Dr. Metablog

Cornell English Then and Now -- 1

Here's a truth that blows my freakin' mind: since I earned my B. A. in English from Cornell University in 1960, sixty-five years have come and gone. Glaciers have melted and rivers have changed their course since, way back when, in a prior millennium, I was first introduced to serious literature -- to Chaucer and Milton and George Eliot.

My professors in those far-away-and-long-ago days were exclusively male and for the most part veterans of WW2 or the Korean war. They wrote definitive scholarly articles for the Philological Quarterly or for Modern Philology; they published learned monographs on canonical poets and novelists; and they taught courses with such forthright titles as The Seventeenth Century and Wordsworth and Coleridge. Although I was an indifferent student before I arrived at Cornell, I found an intellectual home in the Department of English. Inasmuch as I did not have a brain for rigorous science or for the tough analytic philosophy that was then in fashion, I was fortunate that the work of English suited my limited abilities -- curiosity, patience, a good memory, and something of a feel for language.

Just yesterday (and what, pray tell, prompted me?), I took a peek at the current website of Cornell's English Department. (In the index-card 1950s, when the manual typewriter was the acme of technology, the word "website" would have signified a dark corner colonized by spiders.) Even at first glance, the 2025 Cornell website said to me "very very different, very 'now'." While an occasional word or phrase was recognizable, it was the novelty -- the modernity, I guess -- that flared from the electronic page and dazzled mine eyne. Time marches on, no doubt, but whether it marches boldly forward or plunges over a cliff remains to be established.  

First of all, it's no longer the Department of English. It's now, hurrah!, the "Department of Literatures in English." What a welcome redefinition -- an assertion that English is a world language and that it houses a world literature. Nowadays, if I sit down with a work of fiction, I'm just as likely to read a novel by a writer from Africa or India or Australia as one from the British isles or North America. There's not a reason in the world why Chinua Achebe or Abdulrazak Gurnah should not be studied in an English Department. I respect this shift in focus and I regret that my 1950s Beowulf-to-T. S. Eliot English department was so parochial, so provincial. I can only admire the fact that the Department of Literatures in English has annexed to itself whole continents of writing -- a case of academic imperialism that this time seems wholly right and just.

The website also reveals that, in a nation in which the study of the humanities in higher education is at risk, Cornell's English is a huge thriving enterprise. There are fifty-one people on permanent staff, almost all of professorial rank. Of this number, twenty-seven -- or slightly more than half -- are women. And among those pictured on the site, a significant number are "of color." Undoubtedly, the present department is a far more representative collection of individuals than my 1950s faculty. Moreover, the chair, the associate chair, the director of undergraduate studies, the director of graduate students, and the director of writing are all women. It may once have been the case that the occasional female interloper was a token for display only, but not so now.

And what do these handsome and distinguished men and women study? Fortunately for me, members of the faculty list their areas of concentration. Most claim two or three specialties, some as many as five; a few recalcitrant individuals list none, leaving me to wonder whether they are polymaths or just ornery uncooperative academics. Among the fifty-one, the single expertise most commonly claimed is "cultural studies." This preponderance set me back a bit, because "cultural studies" is not a term I recognize nor one that existed, as far as I know, in the 1950s, when the word "culture" was synonymous with "civilization" -- sometimes just Western Civilization -- and when "cultured" meant something equivalent to "educated" and possibly even "socially established." But now, apparently, "cultural studies" is, and I quote a respected source, "an academic field  that... investigates how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power. These include ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender." Am I correct, and is it possible, for me to infer from this litany of nouns that "cultural practices" comprehends just about everything that we as a society say or do? Clearly the Department of Literatures in English lays claim to a heck of a lot of intellectual territory -- and that it is a far more aggressive entity than is revealed by its mere absorption of Anglophone novels. I was initially suspicious of these extensive claims, but after reflecting a while I recognized that, if I set to one side the self-aggrandizing listing of ideology, ethnicity, class... etc,), cultural studies may in practice simply bring to the forefront such elements as imperialism and nationhood in Robinson Crusoe or race and gender in Othello. Wouldn't it be comforting if "cultural studies" is at least in part merely traditional wine in spiffy new bottles? I, for one, certainly hope so.

After cultural studies, it is "literary theory" that claims the largest group of adherents -- thirteen, or about a quarter of the faculty. This revelation surprised me because I would have guessed that "theory" had long since gone the way of the aurochs and the mouflon. "Theory" had its herd of enthusiasts in its obscurantist heyday in the last century, yet it seems to be alive and kicking at Cornell -- but only, I suspect, as a vestigial remnant of an earlier time and only among the more senior members of the Department.

Following "theory" in popularity among the professoriate are the seven members who stake their claim to "gender studies." Six other say "African-American." The nine who announce a specialty in creative writing may not know that they are the successors and the beneficiaries of the late revered Professor James McConkey. Not a single member of the faculty offers "Shakespeare" or "Milton" as an area of expertise. I do not doubt that the study of gender and African-American and Asian-American literatures is a good thing, but I would have wished that the authors of the finest works of art in all of Anglophonia be accorded equivalent attention and status.   

Would a reincarnated Youthful Me elect take a degree from such a faculty?  I'm skeptical, but I can't say for sure because I don't know whether or not, in the classroom, the scrupulous examination of literature and ideas has been undermined by transitory and faddish ideologies. I must confess that the biases of the website make me feel old and wary and out of touch. And tired.

Well then, what does take place in the classroom?

Let's sample some evidence.

In days of yore, I enrolled in "Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama," a course taught by the distinguished scholar and teacher David Novarr. The course was organized as a chronological march from Kyd and Marlowe in the 1580s right through to Ford and Massinger -- the last playwrights of significance before the theaters went dark in 1642. I remember savoring some delightful comedies by Ben Jonson and Francis Beaumont and also a couple of ferociously brilliant tragedies by Thomas Middleton -- writings, I suspect, that 2020s English majors are not destined to encounter -- even though an acquaintance with these plays is essential background for understanding the timeless works of Shakespeare.  

There's no equivalent course in the present curriculum, but there is an analogue, and it appears in the catalogue of offerings thusly: 

ENGL 3240. Blood Politics:  Comparative Renaissance Drama

Blood is everywhere. From vampire shows to video games, our culture seems to be obsessed with it. The course examines the power of "blood" in the early modern period as a figure that continues to capture our imagination, not only as a marker of racial, religious, and sexual difference and desire, but also as a dramatic player in its own right. How does a politics of blood appear on stage when populations are being expelled and colonized for reasons (mis)understood in terms of blood?.... Topics include honor, revenge, purity, the body, sexuality, conversion, and death.

The course description itself is a mess -- both incomprehensible and meretricious. I'm shocked by the catchpenny pandering. Do 2020s teachers need to lure students into their classrooms with "vampires" and "videos?" The assertion that "blood is a dramatic player in its own right" is nonsense. The description reads like advertising copy for a cheesy low-budget horror flick playing at some louche all-night grind house.

Moreover, "blood" isn't "everywhere." Goodness gracious!

I'm afraid that these entrancing plays are doomed to be put through the "cultural studies" homogenizer. Or "theorized" out of all compass.

Ah, well.

Back in 1960, I had a summer job in Ithaca and therefore happened to be loafing around the campus when the University hosted its returning alumni. Among the returnees were the old folks  -- some few of them members of the class of 1895 -- who had walkered and wheel-chaired to their Sixty-Fifth. Geezers, I thought. It's sobering to realize that those codgers were the same age -- 86 -- as I am now. Should I  return to Ithaca this coming spring, for my very own Sixty-Fifth, I will be perceived by the young 'uns exactly as I observed those Class of 1895 guys: as ancient and irrelevant.

It follows, therefore, that my reservations about the 2025 English curriculum have their exact parallel in the 1895ers perspective on my 1960 curriculum. It's not hard to imagine that they -- I mean the members of the class of 1895 -- who had been educated in elocution and Old Norse, would have been shocked and perhaps outraged by the 1950s "modern" curriculum that I found so enticing and illuminating.

And now, because I don't want to go full curmudgeon and become the kind of superannuated guy who shakes his ebony stick at the modern world and deplores the decline of civilization, I'm going to make an effort to find out what's really going on in 2025. I have therefore set myself the task of reading a representative sample of the books written by members of the present-day English faculty.

I'll report on my studies right here.

Stay tuned.

[January 18] Bernhard Starr writes:  "Vivian, you are right about the course description. It's a disgrace. It's badly written and ridiculous. Why didn't you include the name of the prof. who wrote it?  He/she needs to be exposed. What "populations are being expelled and colonized" by Volpone or The Changeling?  And did you look other course descriptions -- are they equally silly?  What's worst about the course description is that it doesn't respect the plays that the class is going to examine. They're not important interesting dramas to the teacher -- they're just fodder for an ideology. 

[January 19] Vivian de St. Vrain replies: "Mr. Starr, I didn't identify the author of the course description because the website doesn't identify him/her. Just as well. Also, I didn't read other course descriptions though I might do so in the future. I think you're correct that the course description does not respect the dramas or their authors. Which is, as you suggest, mighty disappointing." 

[January 19] Bernhard Starr replies:  "I think I'd rather study Old Norse."

[February 4] Thurston Dale replies:  "I guess I'm a geezer, too (Cornell, '65). I'm glad I majored in English before criticism turned crazy. Great teachers -- Mizener, Abrams, Parrish, Novarr."

[March 17] Anatole Miles Webber writes: "Vivian, you were naive back in the 1950s and you're still naive now. You assume that the Cornell English Department of your youth, 65 years ago, was normative and normal. You were then and still are oblivious to the fact that the Department's 1950 curriculum was the product of stress and change and compromise. Try to remember that there were at least three forces at work and that various faculty members had various degrees of commitment to them. The first group was the oldest -- the traditionalist who studied, as they had always done, literature as history and biography and philology. Get the text and the context right was their primary concern. Then there were the 'new critics" -- heirs to Leavis and Scrutiny in England and the southern agrarians (Ransom, Tate, Warren) in the US. But the main intellectual current riling English Departments were the fierce critics out of New York (mostly Jewish) circles (Kazin, Trilling, Fiedler, Paul Goodman, Irving Howe, etc). In retrospect, even though Cornell brought both Lionel Trilling and Cleanth Brooks to Ithaca during your and my years there, the new winds made little impression on our education. Cornell was peaceful, isolated and non-ideological. It appears from your writing that you preferred it that way and still do. It was stable until the theory people brought in novelty and confusion and excitement.

[April 15] Parnell Pratt replies: "And also monumental pretension. And eventual collapse and failure."

[May 3] Lance Birdseye (Lt., USAF) writes: "What a funny website this is. Hey, folks, join the real world."

 

Basketball in My LIfe

My father, who was born in 1904, was a basketball enthusiast when the game was in its infancy. He played guard on Eastern District High School's team and later played as a freshman at CCNY under legendary coach Nat Holman. But Dad came from an impoverished family and left college after one year because, he told me once, "I couldn't see how I could stay in school when my family needed so much." So while his formal education went by the wayside, he was able to make up the difference by a lifetime of reading. And although he was not a complaining sort, it was clear to me and I think to my brothers that he felt a bit grieved that his formal athletic career had been cut so short. He kept at it, though, on his own. Well into his forties, he was absent from family dinner one night a week. "Wednesdays," my mother explained, long before I could understand what the words meant, "your father goes to the gym." And Saturday mornings, in warm weather, were reserved for tennis. Dad very much wanted his three sons to carry on his athletic tradition, but I think, in retrospect, that in the long run we all disappointed him. Both my brothers were fine athletes although not big or fast enough for professional careers; I was, alack and alas, a disappointment. Dad, who had also been a semi-pro catcher in baseball, taught Gene and Jon how to throw an "inshoot" and an "outshoot," but he could not bring himself to coach me because it was obvious that with my 55 mile an hour fastball and scattershot arm, I wasn't going anywhere, pitching-wise, and although he showed me a couple of basketball moves he was, I recognize, a bit embarrassed by my want of athletic skill. (In my defense I must report that although I was more academic than athletic, I was voted "class athlete" by my P. S. 217 (8-5) eighth grade class -- a group which must have been, now that I think of it, quite a collection of klutzes). My older brother was a good enough basketball player to play for his college team for a year, and my younger brother was an outstanding sandlot all-star in baseball who once struck out Joe Torre, who, it will be remembered, finished his major league career with a .300 lifetime average. (The second time he pitched to Torre, my brother says, the future MVP hit a ball that "is still circling the earth.") I myself had the briefest career on the diamond. The pinnacle of my experience was that, once, playing second base, I turned a double play -- took the toss from the shortstop, stepped on the bag, gracefully wheeled, and pegged the ball perfectly to the first baseman. It happened once and once only, but it was glorious -- definitely a Hall of Fame moment. The peak of my basketball career occurred in the slippery court (which doubled as a dance floor) in the basement of the Flatbush Jewish Center on Coney Island Avenue and Avenue J. I was, I estimate, thirteen years old. Wearing number 3, in black and gold, I was steaming down the left side of the court on a fast break and was forced away from the basket, so instead of a layup I managed a sweeping running left-handed hook which caught nothing but net. There was modest applause. None of my teammates guessed that I had intended to bank the ball off the backboard and that it had slipped out of my hand and swished, entirely by accident. I only reveal this deep secret now, very now.  Another high point in my career: I once won a local foul shooting contest. I hit 23 of 25. One small caveat, though. The contest was conducted in the P.S. 217 schoolyard, where the baskets were, how shall I say this correctly, unsteady and soft. As a result, they were like sewers -- everything flushed. I doubt that I would have made 23 on a standard rigid rim. Nevertheless, I did win the medal and the other competitors all used the same ball and basket as I -- so, therefore, a modest triumph. And then playing basketball faded into the background, because I didn't get my growth until very late and for a while I was playing at 4' 11" or 5' 1" against hairy guys who had already reached their full mature height. But I continued to pursue my undistinguished career -- including the most competitive activity of my life -- three on three half court in the EHHS gym, one basket wins, and "winners out." And then a little intramural in Ithaca; an occasional pickup game in Cambridge. Oh, and twenty years later on, I played a bit with my own offspring, all three of whom were more athletic than I. My last pathetic hurrah (almost a decade ago, now) was being obliterated at h-o-r-s-e by my granddaughter Ella. 

Nevertheless, I retained my interest in the sport. No longer a participant, I became a serious spectator. I know enough about roundball to appreciate both player and play. For thirty years or so, I had a good seat at the home games of the CU Buffaloes -- it was high quality college basketball (although the Buffs rarely enjoyed a winning season). One source of interest and fun for me was to evaluate the talent and try to predict which of our guys (or the visitors') had the skill and size to move up to the next level. Over the years, I followed the early days of many a later NBA regular -- and even a couple of stars. I remember in particular Jay Humphries, who played four excellent seasons for CU and then averaged in double figures during an extended NBA career. Also local lad Chauncey Billups, "Mr Big Shot" himself. Andre Roberson, a terrific defender and rebounder who never lived up to his potential because he just couldn't master the corner three; Matt Bullard, a fine outside shooter; Scott Wedman; Alec Burks; Derrick White (still playing for Boston and getting better each year); and Spencer Dinwiddie, whom I didn't judge to be an NBA player but who has become a steady professional. The high point of my CU spectatorial career occurred in 2006 when the Texas Longhorns brought to our stadium a gangly teen-ager named Kevin Durant. One didn't have to be a sophisticated evaluator of talent to recognize that KD had a spectacular career ahead of him; it was grandly obvious. It took him only two years to lead the NBA in scoring. I stopped attending CU games when the athletic department, an independent entity with only a loose connection to the University, demanded that I make a donation of $400 for the privilege of purchasing season tickets. I resented the presumption, and I felt that there were many causes more worthy of my limited philanthropy than CU basketball. Although I stay away from our local Events Center, I'm still an occasional arena visitor. In fact, just last season, LERM and I bought incredibly expensive tickets to watch the Cavaliers take on the Pelicans at the Smoothie King Arena in New Orleans. The venue was up-to-date but way too brightly lit, and crowded, and noisy. Moreover, I dislike the theory that attendees must be continually entertained and placated with garish novelties. I don't go to basketball games for the half-time acrobats or the animal acts or the costumed dancers or the "kiss-cam" or the ear-popping "music" nor to be commanded when to cheer or when to chant "DE-FENSE." I go to watch and admire the players. Despite the distractions it was a good game, even though Zion Williamson was out with an ankle injury. These pros, even the unheralded ones, are fabulous athletes and they are especially impressive in person. 

So for most of my life it's been the electronic medium that has kept me abreast of the game. It all started with radio; I suspect that very few readers of this entry will be able to recall the fast-paced narration of Marty Glickman on WHN, but he was, let me tell you, a hoops artist who could bring the Knicks alive with voice alone. Then came television, sometime around the early 1950s. The thirteen inch black-and-white Dumont that my father acquired displayed an image that seemed miraculous at the time but paleolithically primitive compared to the 60" HDTV that entrances me nowadays. It's all present -- right there before my astonished eyes. Incredible no-look passes and sensational blocks and three-pointers from downtown -- and also horrid tattoos -- in brilliant color. In my TV-basketball saturated brain is stored the entire history of the NBA from then until now. In the 50s, Max Zaslofsky, Harry Gallatin, Sweetwater Clifton, Carl Braun, the McGuire brothers Dick and Al, and Ernie Vandeweghe, who played only home games because he was a full-time medical student. A team that was good but always managed to lose to the Celtics -- who had Cousy and Sharman and later Bill Russell, the Jones boys (Sam and KC), Havlicek and Heinsohn. I was in those years a most loyal and enthusiastic fan of our own New York Knickerbockers -- the championship teams composed of Willis Reed, Dave DeBusschere, Bill Bradley, Earl Monroe, and Walt Frazier, names and faces as present in my memory as the more celebrated Dodger boys of summer. Then came the Magic-Bird era, LA "showtime," Michael Jordan, Duncan-Ginobili-Parker-Popovich, and now LeBron James, who, although, he is certainly the most effective player in history, is less exciting to watch than his innovative contemporary, Steph Curry. During this last while, I've become a devoted GSW fan; when they were at their best, a few years ago, they played an extraordinarily beautiful game. There were nights when they'd score 30 baskets on 25 lovely assists. It's been a great ride that's now coming to an end, but there's another generation of players on the horizon and perhaps I'll be around long enough to enjoy them. After all, I've been there for the entire history of the NBA. What developments I have seen! What was once a local, coterie sport has gone international, with many of the best players coming from overseas or south of the border. Where once all the players, save a few, were White and middle-class, now 75% to 80% are Black and inner-city, bringing with them a heck of a lot of skill and flash and dazzle. Lumbering awkward centers, with their slow roundhouse hook shots, have been superseded by astonishingly mobile 7-footers who can protect the rim but also drift outside to nail a three. Salaries, in the old days, were little more than nominal and now there are marginal players making millions off the bench. The athletes have become celebrities -- and their shoes have become almost as famous as they are, and more lucrative. Franchises, which once went for a song, are now worth billions.

When I'm watching a game on a Sunday afternoon, I think about my father. I wish he could sit with me and discuss the progress of the sport. I'd like to show him what has happened since he left us in 1985. He'd like it that the players are bigger, faster, stronger, in better shape, and that the shooting is more accurate and the defenses more subtle and sophisticated. He'd love the pick-and-roll and the pick-and-pop. He'd appreciate the alley-oops and the accurate full court passes. I also know what he wouldn't like -- the overhasty three, the lenient interpretation of walking and palming, and the occasional showboating, Most of all, he'd hate it that the NBA is now in cahoots with the gambling establishment. He would see it, as I do, as a major miscalculation -- as a scandal waiting to happen. 

Every once in a while, even at this advanced age, I dream that I'm in the midst of a game, and I rise up and with an effortless flick of the right wrist launch a perfect 40-foot three that hardly even grazes the net. A childish fantasy, perhaps, but still very  satisfying.  

Anemoia

The premise of Riley Black's The Last Days of the Dinosaurs (New York, 2022) is a most splendid one. Imagine, she proposes, that it is 66 million years ago and dinosaurs are the monarchs of the earth. What was it like, in that era, to be alive in, say, the steamy forests where Wyoming now lies -- a world in which club-tailed ankylosaurs were tracked by tyrannosaurs while primitive mammals scuttled in the ferny underbrush. Rich and strange, certainly. And then, how was it all transformed on "the worst day in the history of the planet" when the Chicxulub asteroid plowed into the Yucatan? One fine day, the dinosaurs were triumphant; and then in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the six-mile-wide asteroid crash lands and everything goes all kablooey -- the sure and firm-set earth shakes, the atmosphere turns furnace hot, and acid rain and smoke and fire and tsunamis snuff out 80 per cent of our planet's animal species.

It's a fabulous idea for a masterpiece of science writing, and consequently I'm grieved to report that The Last Days of the Dinosaurs is a disappointing book. It is loose and melodramatic and outrageously padded -- a thirty page essay turned into a swollen three hundred page opus. It's much too pop; it's insufficiently serious and therefore leaves poor frustrated me craving data and detail rather than reiteration. Who could believe that the high drama of Chicxulub could become quite so tedious? I put the blame on Ms. Black's literary agent, who, I have no shadow of doubt, advised her to "turn your idea into a book, and keep it easy -- not too technical -- you'll sell a lot more copies."

What a shame, because Black is well-informed and writes with intermittent flair. She loves her reptiles, and in particular displays genuine warmth, almost reverence, for every young person's favorite dinosaur, the tyrannosaurus rex. An infatuation that lingers from her childhood, I suspect. I myself, not similarly transfixed, might have supposed that T. Rex had been expelled from the Terrible Lizard Hall of Fame sometime in the 1990s, when it came to be gospel that the 60-foot tall monster was not a top-of-the-food-chain predator but merely a snuffling scavenger. Was it not revealed to us that the creature's meager brain was dwarfed by its olfactory bulbs, so that it could effortlessly detect decaying flesh over the unbounded western landscapes? And was it not also agreed that its puny forelegs were useless for pursuit or attack? Black will have nothing of such paleontological revisionism. Her T. Rex is a hunter, lurking in ambush to pounce and to crunch with one powerful bite the enormous protuberant osteoderms that protected the stegosaurus spine. To me, the idea that a beast as gigantic as a tyrannosaurus could conceal itself behind bush or boulder and sneakily lunge at its prey seems totally ludicrous.

Black, bless her kindly heart, firmly embraces the unrevised T. Rex. Her loyalty is transcendent. In a burst of psychological overkill, she describes her crush on the dinosaur as an example of anemoia. And what, readers rightly ask, is anemoia?  It's an unfamiliar word that describes a baffling concept. Upon investigation,"anemoia" turns out to be a recent coinage, a "fire-new" word (as WS, in LLL, calls such innovations). It's "a nostalgia for a time one has never known," such as Black seems to feel about the years and days that preceded Chicxulub. And here I must once again reveal my want of imagination. Anemoia, however hard I labor to grasp the idea, is too subtle for my downright brain. Isn't it the case that "nostalgia" is by definition a cherishing of something in one's own personal history, as such a one as I might remember with warmth a concert or a wedding or that long ago glorious day in which I, batting leadoff, started the game with a triple to right field.

I can't quite fathom a nostalgia for something I've not known in my own person. The emotion that Black describes I would call simple curiosity. I'm as intrigued as the next guy about the past and I can certainly summon a yearning to have been present at some great historical event, but I wouldn't call it anemoia. For example, I might wish that I had been at Fenway on September 30, 1960, the day that Ted Williams blasted a home run on his very last time at bat -- but I wasn't there and it would be a falsehood to claim otherwise. [Full disclosure: I was in attendance, just behind third base, the previous day, September 29, and therefore missed the moment by a scant twenty-four hours.] Unlike Black, I'm not anemoiac about the dinosaur-dominated world of the K-P boundary, but I have other anemoiac -- as I've now redefined the word -- yearnings.

My most pressing and immediate wish would be to have joined the crowd at a performance at the Globe Theatre in London, perhaps of Hamlet in 1599 or Macbeth in 1606. Why? Because even though Shakespeare's works have been studied microscopically for more than 400 years, no one really knows how those plays originally looked or sounded. My suspicion is that they were far more foreign, more strange, less realistic and more primitive than scholars recognize. After all, the most brilliant play ever written, King Lear, was performed in daylight and the actors had to project their voices to a crowd of 2000 people, many of them shuffling about, gossiping, and cracking hazelnuts. No sets, no curtains, no lighting, and no scenery to speak of. I'd guess that the cast employed a style of dramaturgy closer to its medieval inheritance of allegorical representation than we like to admit. Furthermore, I am convinced that if I were present there at the actual Globe, I would discover an endless series of unknown unknowns. Unimaginable unknowns, that would knock our anemoiac socks off. The past is another country; they do things a heck of a lot differently there.

But wait! My dormant anemoia, now aroused, yearns to experience in my own person other events in the past. Where else to indulge my wants? Certainly in Athens, at a performance of a play by Sophocles -- which I can guarantee to be a hundred times stranger than anything London could possibly offer.

But why only the arts?  Now that I think of it, I would love to take a gander at forested Manhattan Island when Henry Hudson's Half Moon made its first landfall. I could have talked to the Lenapes; tried to warn them about the dangers that were coming down the pike. And there's much more. Just prior to struggling through The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, I read Marie Favereau's The Horde (2021), a most fascinating history of the Mongol civilization that conquered and controlled the area from Hungary in the west to Korea in the east during the 13th century and the first half of the 14th. Favereau's depiction of the Mongols was novel and disorienting, essentially because I'm accustomed to think about great empires as centered on a dominant imperial city -- Athens, Rome, London. I believe that I understand a little of what life might have been like in Rome; after all, I've read some of the ancient historians and I know a bit about cities. I've even toured Pompeii, for goodness sake! But the Mongols did not live in cities; they were not particularly literate, they were unabashedly polygamous, animist, and almost entirely nomadic. It's a challenge to imagine a "city" of a hundred thousand people in constant migratory motion. When Mongol men went to war, which they seemed to do often and always, they brought along the women and children, the cattle-drawn carts and wagons and the felt tents along with their horses, goats and sheep. To spend time with a wandering horde, an entirely unfamiliar form of civilization, and to try to understand their mental world, would certainly challenge and enlarge my (and your) conception of what it means to be a human being.

Favereau doesn't dwell on such speculations (she is more concerned with military history than social or psychological matters) but nevertheless the ways in which the migrants related to each other and to their environment had to be entirely foreign to us mostly urban, post Age of Reason moderns. What was it like to be a Mongol? Perhaps I feel this question personally because a recent examination of my DNA tells me that I'm 1% Asian by genetic inheritance. I assume, naturally, that like approximately 16,000,000 other people, I'm directly descended from Mongol leader Chinggis (formerly Genghiz) Khan through one of his seven wives or his innumerable concubines. Is it anemoia, a recognition of my kinship to Grandpa Genghiz, that has produced in me, this morning, such a wildness in the blood? Or is it the caffeine?

In actual fact, although I'm most curious about Mongol life, I don't think that I would have made a good nomad. In the first place, I suffer from serious directional disabilities and would no doubt promptly misplace myself on the vast and featureless Eurasian steppe; and secondly, I lack enthusiasm for subsisting on kumis, the fermented mare's milk which was the staple of the Mongol diet.

Let me now admit that while I indulge some pseudo-anemoia for my distant Mongol forebears, I feel much closer to my more recent Ukrainian shtetl ancestors. If I could be plopped down in the western Ukraine, I might be able to absorb the texture of life in Staroconstantinov in 1895, just before brave Isaiah and Eta set out for America.  As things stand, I know almost nothing of any importance about the lives of my eastern European ancestors. How did these resilient folks survive centuries, millennia,  of dearth, disease and pogroms? What did they eat? Where did they sleep? What, indeed, did they do for "fun," if they had any conception of fun? What did they read? How did the sexes relate to each other? How did they find privacy? And most significantly: how seriously did they embrace that narrow, all-encompassing and demanding religion?

A nineteenth-century shtetl seems impossibly foreign and faraway, but in the longer time frame, it's actually very recent. The most distant past that we can readily imagine is when the archeological record begins to appear -- perhaps five thousand year ago. But my and your fully human ancestors migrated from the Olduvai Gorge some 60,000 years ago, which leaves approximately 55,000 years without any data at all -- or at least nothing beyond the merest occasional trace. For these many millennia our forbears lived in world where there were no cities, no writing, no pottery, no weaving, no domesticated plants or animals, no metals, no wheels and therefore no vehicles -- only stone hand axes and later spears and much later still bows and arrows. Two thousand five hundred precarious generations of foraging! I would like to see for myself how our common ancestors managed to survive when the gigantic short-faced bear competed for the cave and the terrifying European lion lurked in the shadows. I suspect also that the most dangerous predator our g g g... grandfathers faced was the tribe next door -- otherwise why would we have inherited such hostility to people who look or act just slightly differently than ourselves. Wouldn't it be profoundly anemoiac to join a family of our mutual forebears for a week or two and participate with them as they went about their lives?

What a treasure-trove of unknown unknowns would we confront!

Our Visit to Beardstown, Illinois

We visited Beardstown, in southwestern Illinois, because it was the birthplace, in 1845, of one of Lynn's maternal great-grandmothers, Mary St. John DeHaven. Even though it is Lincoln country, we had no idea what to expect, the AAA entry being so scant, but we soon discovered that Beardstown is a place that had its moment of glory sometime in the nineteenth century, but which has allowed history to pass it by. While it's not entirely derelict, it's not even slightly prosperous -- nor has it achieved quaintness. The industry of note nowadays is the JBS meat-packing plant out on the Arenzville Road; most of its employees come from south of the border, which is why the only indication that Beardstown might someday be rejuvenated is the dozen or so new downtown taquerias and iglesias.

Our first stop in Beardstown was a decaying, rather pathetic 200-foot long peeling boardwalk along the sandy Illinois River, a waterway which in the years before the Civil War had been a thriving commercial thoroughfare. There we watched a solitary tug struggle to free a barge that had somehow run itself aground. Perhaps the boardwalk had once welcomed visitors and tourists, but during our stay the only spectator beside ourselves was a very frayed out-of-work fellow who arrived on a beaten-up bicycle, and who seemed entirely out of his depth when we asked if there was a place in Beardstown to purchase a cup of coffee. To me, he seemed addled; I suspected meth or opioids.

After gazing at the sluggish river for half an hour (remembering Abraham Lincoln's enthusiasm for river transport), we toured the few blocks of the old downtown, in which fewer storefronts were occupied than were vacant. We looked in at an antique store -- actually less "antique" than "junque" (unless a flashy bejewelled Elvis Presley doll was a revered artifact of a prior civilization). Lynn purchased an owl-decorated piece of blue porcelain for $5.00. We inquired of the proprietor, Mrs. White, if there were a coffee shop in Beardstown. Patricia White, we soon learned, was a recently retired public school music teacher and a lively lady knowledgeable about all things Beardstownian. I asked her about the intriguing storefront adjacent to hers, which proclaimed itself to be a Grand Opera House. I was skeptical that any sort of grandeur could be found in such dreary town, but I was wrong. Mrs. White generously offered us a tour of the old theater. She warned us that it was in deep disrepair but she said that she and others, led by the local chiropractor, were working diligently towards its restoration. So up a flight of dark stairs we went, and there, lo and behold, was revealed to us the picturesque ruins of what had once been a remarkable structure. Here's a photograph of the remains of its ornate frescoed ceiling and 20-foot-high windows:

The theatre had a well-proportioned stage and had once (before the balcony was pulled down) been able to seat several hundred people. In the littered backstage were the remnants of nineteenth-century traveling shows, including a large painted backdrop of Venetian gondolas, left behind by a company from St. Louis. But the building, though its bones were good, was a wreck: leaks in the roof had caused the ceiling to deteriorate. The auditorium itself had served as a storage area for the overflow merchandise of decades of store owners. It would take a dozen roll-offs and weeks of work just to remove the trash and find the floor. Nevertheless, the Grand Opera House offered us an insight into what Beardstown had been when it was a thriving community. I was so impressed by the theater that I decided to donate my bit to its reconstruction. I had determined on $100 until I noticed that Mrs. White had donned a red white and blue Trump 2020 face mask. And so arose a moral dilemma: I want to support the arts, and I would love to help return the Grand Opera House to its former glory. Opera and music should be beyond politics -- but yet I was deeply repelled by Mrs. White's Trumpism. So I split the difference and donated $60 to the cause. A sensible compromise to a vexing problem?? I don't know. But it's what I did. I wanted to ask Mrs. White what Donald Trump's ignorance, bigotry, authoritarian predilections and corrupt, vacant life had to offer to a cheerful retired teacher in a decaying midwestern town, but I saw no reason to provoke a controversy.  

Afterward, we found some lunch up the street at Sally's Bistro. The bistro did not live up to "bistro" expectations, and could more honestly be called Sally's Diner, but it did make a good BLT and almost-decent coffee. We did not try the "alligator bits" for which it is famous, even though Sally assured us that the bits were much better than the usual alligator tail. (Beardstown has an alligator farm but we didn't tour it.)

Mrs. White had also told us about the "old cemetery" so on a lark we went off to investigate. We wandered about, not expecting much, until we stumbled upon a gravestone which revealed that the late Henry Foster married the late Mary McKeever DeHaven. Lynn doesn't know precisely who these people are, but there are so many of her family names on the marker -- that of her grandfather, George Foster Massey, her uncle, McKeever Massey, her second cousin, Katherine DeHaven Milligan -- that they must  be long-departed members of her extended ancestry. Certainly cousins of some degree.

We googled Henry T. (for True) Foster and found that he was a pillar of the frontier community of Beardstown. He had immigrated from Maine; Mary from Philadelphia. We were gratified by this unexpected find. 

On the return trip from Beardstown to Jacksonville, we stopped at Griggsville, which, we were astonished to discover, is the "purple martin capitol of the nation" and the location of the world's largest purple martin skyscraper. Skeptical?  Here's the proof:

So altogether a most rewarding day.

 

Douglas Bush's Milton Course

In the mid 1980s, thirty-five years ago, I was 'in residence' for a week at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., researching an article on one of the lesser English Renaissance dramatists -- a pleasure as well as a condition of employment. The article that I completed turned out to be not a bad piece of academic prose, if I do say so myself, but not something for the ages either. It was a mere twenty years since I had completed my degree in "English and American Language and Literature" at a Large Eastern University, specifically Harvard. I was not drawn to the Folger for professional reasons only. It was a delight and a great privilege to hold in my very own hands and to read dozens and scores of four-hundred-year-old ephemeral books that -- more than the canonical literature -- helped me to understand the age of Shakespeare. Sermons by the wagonload, biblical commentaries, almanacs, political pamphlets, poems by minor and unknown versifiers, broadsides, medical textbooks, collections of jokes, how-to-write-a-letter-in-Latin trots, schoolbooks. The library possessed inexhaustible troves of such material. The Folger's plenty licensed my dilettante brain to follow its own naturally wayward inclinations.

While doing my duty and also having some fun, I fell in with a fellow Folgerite named Boyd Berry who was visiting from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. Over cups of coffee, Boyd and I discussed some of the less well-known writers of the period in whom we shared a mutual interest. I remember that we also talked about the teacher's perennial frustration at engaging the interest of our sometimes less-than-enthusiastic students. I do not remember what prompted me to ask Boyd this question: "what was the worst course that you ever took either as an undergraduate or graduate student." He replied, without hesitation, "Douglas Bush's lecture course on Milton at Harvard in 1961." I was flabbergasted, in part because I hadn't guessed that Boyd had been at Harvard during my years there, but more because I had enrolled in exactly the same course -- same time same station same year -- and because Douglas Bush's Milton course was also my own nominee for the worst course ever. Parallel lines had accidentally and miraculously met, so to speak. Although Boyd and I were the same age, he was one year behind me and had taken the course as a senior undergraduate while I had been a first-year graduate student. It seemed an astonishing coincidence, but then, the universe of students of English Renaissance literature is a small one. Nevertheless, the fact that we shared the same opinion about Professor Bush's course was comforting and, as they say, "validating." Boyd said out loud words that I had only speculated upon in petto. Perhaps I wasn't the only outlier.

Why were we in such accord? The obvious answer is that Professor Bush, then in the tail end of his much-celebrated career (he had uttered his infant cries during Grover Cleveland's second presidency), was tired and bored by his teaching and put little heart into the work. In brief, he droned, unconscionably. Not only did he drone, but it seemed as though there was an invisible shield between his podium and our seats. He didn't speak to us -- he addressed the empyrean. His lectures consisted of a superficial running commentary on Milton's poems. "There's a particularly lovely passage starting on line 695," -- as if a challenging idea would be beyond our collective capacity. If a student broke into the drone to hazard a question, Professor Bush's characteristic answer was, "Well, that seems self-explanatory." But Bush's classroom style was not the only reason for my unhappiness; I had more substantive concerns. 

Let me interject a few words about Professor John Nash Douglas Bush. Although almost forgotten today, Bush was by all odds the most formidable and learned literary scholar of his generation. He knew everything there was to know about English, Romance, and classical literature and had written a dozen comprehensive critical and historical books. If the gossip can be trusted, he greeted the dawn of each new day by reading two hundred lines of Latin poetry and a hundred of Greek. I am sure that he knew more about John Milton than Milton knew about himself. He had edited the volume of Milton's complete poetry (English, Latin, Greek, and Italian) and, astonishingly, had memorized the entire twelve books of Paradise Lost. He was an exacting scholar and a stylish and witty writer. Moreover, he was a kindly, gentle man, cordial and generous to his students -- even to me. If he had flaws of character, I didn't know of them. To my mind, he was an unimpeachably excellent person and scholar -- and at the same time a teacher from whom I learned just about nothing.  

I was once invited -- along with a clutch of my ambitious graduate-school classmates -- to some sort of reception at Professor Bush's Cambridge residence. His home was exactly as it should have been -- that is to say, if one were making a movie about a distinguished Harvard professor, one's location scout would not rest until he discovered the Bush quarters. It was a spacious and civilized home presided over by gracious Mrs. Bush, who was also exactly as she should have been. I remember that the giant main room in the house -- which must once have been two or more large rooms that had been sutured together, was Professor Bush's enormous study. It was more like an institutional library than something to be found in a private home. Just as one would expect, the study was lined floor to ceiling with handsome wooden bookcases chock full of an enviable display of publications in many languages, some of which I could identify. I remember being served sherry, I think, and also something preternaturally green and fishy on an unfamiliar but I'm sure very elite kind of cracker. This dream of an academic utopia filled me with envy. It also scared the living blazes out of me. Why? Because for all Professor Bush's elegance and his library, and his lovely deferential wife, his movie-set home struck me as soft, fey, self-satisfied, and bloodless. I was dazzled and intimidated by its splendors but at the same time wary and resistant. Only five years beyond crowded Erasmus Hall High School in darkest Brooklyn, I knew myself well enough to know that, however seductive, his style of life was not for me. I would have to find a more appropriate path. 

Now I want to step further back and report on two cases in which I was in conflict with Professor Douglas Bush. Actually, the conflicts were only on my side; Professor Bush, Olympian and serene, did not notice -- nor should he have, frankly. These incidents continue to haunt me to this day, sixty years after the fact. Both occurred not in the Milton course, but in an "advanced" seminar called "Science and Humanism in the Seventeenth Century." I must explain that the word "humanism" did not carry the meaning that it does today, as in the phrase "secular humanism" -- an approach to the natural world that is allied with agnosticism and which sometimes resolves into pure atheism. Professor Bush's humanism was the altogether different "Christian humanism." It was, in brief, the noble but ultimately unsuccessful Renaissance attempt to fuse the "inspired" and "revealed" truths of Christianity with the thoughtful, upstanding but unfortunately "natural" morality of the Greeks and Romans. If "Christian Humanism" could be distilled to a sentence, it would be Desiderius Erasmus' daring speculation -- that he would like someday to be able to say, "Sancte Socrates, ora pro nobis", or "Saint Socrates, pray for us."

I was a humanist of the secular variety -- by birth, inclination, education and because in my brain there was no place, not even a lone neuron, where "faith" or "prayer' or "worship" might in more standard heads be lodged. Bush, on the other hand, was not just a scholar of Christian Humanism, he was an honest-to-god trapped-in-amber Christian Humanist -- and a devout one, deeply rooted and entirely comfortable in late medieval/early renaissance thinking. In his seminar on Science and Humanism, humanism was right and just, and science, its antagonist, was, if not altogether bad, at a minimum a very dangerous alternative. Did not both Bacon and Descartes assert that "nature" -- the real world -- could be studied directly, on its own terms, rather than as an entity infused with god's being and majesty. That we mortals might study nature not to reaffirm the goodness and omnipotence of god, but to accumulate objective knowledge and to reap practical material benefits. It's a fact that the separation of nature from the "truth" of religion has over the centuries unquestionably led to the marginalizing of Christian thinking and therefore, according to Bush's view of the world, to the steep decline of civilization. The world, no longer driven by revelation, has been going to hell in a heathen hand basket, as Professor Bush said or implied every Tuesday at 4:00 pm.

Regular readers of this blague as well as Dr. Metablog's family and friends will recognize that Youthful Me did not accept Bush's premises. In fact, in those days, I was probably even less open to religious ideas than I am now. And therefore, each Tuesday was a day of discomfort.

And then, one afternoon, Professor Bush began the allotted two hours by launching a surprise assault on the then-new and controversial Third Edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The Third had shocked traditionalists. Until 1962, dictionaries had been "prescriptive "-- that is, they explained how language "should" be used and they stigmatized as colloq. or subst. [substandard] those words or expressions that fell beneath the bar. The Third forsook tradition and was not prescriptive but descriptive. It aimed to record the language as it was really used. The Third therefore included many words hitherto banned as slang or vulgar and it was loose and permissive with regard to "shall" and "will", and "imply" and "infer," etc. For Professor Bush, the Third was a plunge into darkness -- another example of the collapse of Western Civilization as we know it, or should know it. So he excoriated the new dictionary and its editors and its supporters. The tirade having been completed, he turned mildly to the class and asked if anyone present had a different opinion. Now I had learned a little about modern linguistics at Cornell, and I was a descriptivist both by education and democratic instinct, and I knew that Bush was completely out of step with contemporary thought. I was astonished to discover that I knew more about this particular field of knowledge than he. But, alas, I was totally intimidated and did not open my mouth. What abject cowardice on my part! Nary a word did I say, and so the class segued to a discussion of the Cambridge Platonists and their vain attempt to tame and assimilate Descartes and Spinoza. I still wonder if any of the other 2G's around the table were aware of my shame. Probably not -- did my peers, the late Arthur Oberg, the late Jake Mills, the late Brian Hepworth, the late Terry Logan, the late Bill Godshalk, and others whose names I have forgotten, notice my moral collapse? I suppose that it's too late to worry. Nevertheless, my failure to raise my hand and voice still humiliates me, still rankles. 

Another Tuesday, another surrender. In 1961, William Empson published his innovative study, Milton's God. While Empson was not as learned as Professor Bush (no one was) he was a much more imaginative and challenging reader. Some say that after Johnson and Hazlitt, Sir William has been English literature's most insightful critic. Empson was an intellectual and social dissenter (he had been banished from Magdalen College, Cambridge when a condom [horrors!] was discovered among his possessions). He had written two highly influential critical books that every serious mid-century student of literature studied -- the first on ambiguity, the second on pastoral. Empson read Paradise Lost through a very different lens than Bush. He was not a Christian; in fact, he confessed himself anti-Christian because he judged there to be a serious moral flaw at the heart of the religion -- that the sacrifice of Jesus was a highly elaborated form a scapegoating. About Paradise Lost, he concluded that God (that is, the character God in the epic) was confused and contradictory, repeatedly tying himself into logical and rhetorical knots in order to justify the unjustifiable. He also argued that irrespective of Milton's intention, the character God became more complex and interesting when he became less ideological and more dramatic; more, so to speak, human. He revered Paradise Lost, but for his own, not Bush's, reasons. Milton's God was trashed by Professor Bush, who dismissed Empson as a simple "village atheist." I was stunned. True enough that Empson was an atheist, but true also that he was a powerful thinker, not someone to be given the back of the hand with a flippant ad hominem. Bush's review came out in The New York Times on a Sunday; the following Tuesday, our teacher was lauded by my fellow seminarians. He basked in their admiration. Did my young colleagues genuinely agree with Bush, or were they egregious sycophantic toadies? I don't know and will never know. And then, after the celebration, Bush asked, as if he were open-minded, "Does anyone here have a different opinion?" If Empson had been summarily dispatched, what chance had I? So once again, I fled the field, remained mute -- and slunk deeper into my expensive leather chair. 

So there they were, my two abject failures of nerve.

 

Have I flagellated myself sufficiently? 

 

But now I also remember a third Science and Humanism event -- the Tuesday that Professor Bush fell asleep.

 

The class routine was for members of the seminar to offer a ten-minute presentation on the topic of the day, after which Professor Bush would initiate discussion with the unfocussed inquiry, "Any questions, or comments? " At which point I would yearn for my Cloak of Invisibility. One fatal day, the student in question was John Knott, a fine and intelligent youth but not a ball of fire, oratorically speaking. When he brought his effort to a close, there at the head of the table sat Professor Bush, eyes closed, breathing rhythmically, his large round head bobbling on his small round body, lost in blissful slumber. A few seconds went by, then some more seconds, a minute, a minute and a half. Thanks be to all the gods in the pantheon that he did not snore! And yet there we all were, arrayed around that splendid dark mahogany table, frozen. No one moved or even twitched, no one spoke, no one made eye contact with a fellow sufferer. No one breathed. It was unbearable. At last, after another twenty or so ticks of the clock, I had endured all I could endure, and I raised my Complete Poetry of John Milton into the air and was just about to let it slam, when Professor Bush opened his eyes, and without the slightest acknowledgement that something unusual had occurred, intoned the familiar words: "Any questions, or comments?" 

 

I do not recall this event in order to nip at Professor Bush's revered heels. Every teacher is entitled, occasionally in a long career, to lose focus while a beginning graduate student discourses on a volume such as Henry More's Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness (an important-in-its-own-day [1660] monograph eloquent in support of rational providentialism and the preexistence of the soul). For all I know, Professor Bush may have been exhausted because he had been up past the midnight hour Monday night, possibly contributing more to scholarship in an evening than I did in an entire career. In hindsight, it was not the sleep itself that distressed me -- it was the passivity and silence of my fellows -- and the fact that when I remained silent I  honored the charade, the falsehood, that Bush was not asleep. Faced with an emperor's-new-clothes opportunity, I punted. 

 

Just as I had failed to defend modern linguistics, had failed to defend the "village atheist," so I failed to bang my book on the board -- an act which would have been forthright and honest and true to myself. The first two events were disgraces of an intellectual kind; the third was one of manners and, I think, of social class. The alliance of Bush and Harvard had overwhelmed me, taken from me my natural freedom of action. Let me confess that it was a secret guilty pleasure to have been accepted into Harvard's kind embrace. I feared banishment. Would I have still been welcome, would I have been worthy, would I have been a gentleman if I had noisily ended the nightmare. I felt, and I feel to this day, that all of us around the table were in an implicit, unacknowledged conspiracy not to notice the obvious so that we could protect the reverend professor and therefore defend the institutions that he exemplified. We contrived not to notice Bush's well-earned snooze because to do so would have punctured the balloon. It would been bad manners, barbaric manners, and to exhibit bad manners in a wood-paneled seminar room would mean that we were not genteel, not civilized, unworthy of Harvard and of the privileges it bestowed on us. 

 

On the other hand, I myself had only twenty-two years on my scrawny back, and was just five years out of rambunctious Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush, where if a teacher were to fall asleep in class, he would within seconds have been met with derisive catcalls and a squadron of paper airplanes. And I admit that, although I conformed myself superficially to the ways of my "betters," I had enough of a residual catcall-and-paper-airplane soul that I have regretted my inaction now these sixty years. 

 

Family, friends and stray internet pilgrims: perhaps you think that I'm making too much of these trivial long-ago-and-far-away events. Far too fraught, too melodramatic. Are you not, readers, skeptical of the idea that he (that is, me) honestly believes that the essence of his being was threatened by a seminar in seventeenth-century European humanism? Possibly you also think that I exaggerate the gap between Harvardity and Brooklynity. So let us return to early 1960s and re-examine the historical context of these events.

 

I have reported on Douglas Bush's theological convictions; let us now turn to his retrograde views on education.

 

Bush was, without question, an unapologetic elitist. I don't mean "elitist" as the word is now popularly used -- as an all-purpose insult to those who are presumed to think that they are better than we because they are wealthy or have studied to a prestigious college. I mean elitist as in "snob." Bush was an elitist because he felt that education was only for the elect. Once you admit ordinary, common folk, by golly, the end is near. He was blunt: "education for all, however fine in theory, in practice ultimately leads to education for none." He deplored the ungenteel idea that "students [would] come to college out of a desire for economic or social advantage." Let them stay in the places to which they were born! In a still shocking moment of undiluted social and racial snobbery, he pronounced that "the rising flood of students is very much like the barbarian invasions of the early Middle Ages." "Barbarian invasions"? His metaphor is "self-explanatory," is it not?  Bush presented himself as a guardian at the gate, protecting Christian Europe from the wild-eyed, uncivilized incursions of Lombards and Visigoths. And how was I to understand the analogy?  Did it not apply to me? Was I a civilized European or was I a violent Vandal? In theory, once I was admitted to Harvard's sacred precincts, I became an insider. But in reality, in my heart, I could identify only with the migratory hordes. Although I was camouflaged by my thrift-store jacket and tie, and I did not bring my seax to class, did not subsist on mare's milk, and felt no urge to sack Harvard, I knew myself to be, in essence, an interloper -- an abominable Avar, or brutal Bulgar, or horrible Hun. Or, in my particular case, a member of the tribe of anxious Ashkenazim. 

 

So now let us circle back to the beginning. Why was "Douglas Bush's Milton course" the worst class ever? For me, it was not just because Bush regularly lulled his classes to sleep. It was also because in his illiberal hands, John Milton, my John Milton, was diluted and distorted. I was, ante Bush, an admirer of Milton's courage and I was infatuated with his poetry. Milton is the only poet in the language, I believe, who ever equalled Shakespeare. Lycidas (written in 1636, the year of Harvard's founding) is in my opinion the world's single best poem. In tribute, I had memorized its 193 glorious lines. Moreover, Milton was a truly admirable human being. He was the furthest left, the most radical figure in the whole of English literature and perhaps in western literature. Did he not defend the execution of Charles I and the end of monarchy?  Did he not argue that marriage should be based not on dynastic alliances, but on love and sexual compatibility? Did he not authorize every individual to interpret the Bible in his own way, without the interference of a church or its priests and ministers -- the "priesthood of all believers?" And was it not true that he composed the Areopagitica, a seminal, essential contribution to freedom of thought?  But for Bush, I regret to say, Milton's impassioned advocacy of human dignity distracted from his poetry. He daydreamed in class about the poems Milton might have written if he hadn't allowed himself to be waylaid and distracted by politics. My Milton, on the other hand, was as much a public man as a poet. He had willingly given twenty years of his life and his precious eyesight to work for the radical transformation of society and for human freedom. Bush's judgment was in my opinion a major error, a disabling error, and it meant that the professor, however knowledgeable, was so blinkered by his conservative ideology that he missed the defining points of Milton's life. Just as I could not fully embrace Bush's Milton, he could not or would not ever fully grasp the greatness, the importance of my Milton. It therefore irked me to sit and listen every day, while Milton's contribution to world history was neglected, discounted, or dismissed. It hurt. 

My Life on "The Hill," 1969-2009

We settled on University Hill by lucky accident. Shortly after accepting a teaching position, I received a letter from my then-chairman Harold Kelling, urging me to write immediately to Professor J. D. A. Ogilvy, who had a house to rent near the University. I jumped to follow instructions and in August, 1969, the four of us (ages 30, 29, 4 and 2) took up residence in a small and lovely jewel of a Craftsman bungalow at 9th and College. It was not only a splendid home in which to start life in Boulder but it was also conveniently located: walking distance to Norlin Library, to the bus to Denver and to the Boulder Public Library, as well as just a block and a half from Highland Elementary School. We lived in that fine house contentedly until January of 1973, when (we were now 5, Eve having joined us in June of 1970) it became clear that we needed room to grow. The boys, Nathaniel and Ben, were adamant that we must remain in the Flatirons school district (Highland had been closed and abandoned -- a significant loss to the community). The children had good instincts; Flatirons Elementary was a wonderful school. It was led by Robert Rea, the finest principal I've ever known. During the winter of '73, we migrated from 9th all the way to a 10th street house that had, as they say, "good bones" but which had been "modernized" -- actually brutalized -- by a succession of owners who had trashed almost all of its Arts and Crafts splendors in favor of oversized mirrors, bright green shag rugs, beaded curtains, flocked wallpaper, and plate glass (replacing stained glass) windows. But heck, it was spacious for a family of five even though fabulously expensive ($46,500). We felt fortunate. There was a bonus: when Althea returned to work after a seven-year interval of pregnancy, birthing, and nursing, she was able to walk back and forth to Boulder High School, where she taught mathematics for many years. With the purchase of the house, our commitment to the Hill strengthened.

10th street was our home for 35 years. Over the course of the decades, we restored our abused home to the extent that our resources permitted. We added insulation (its first) and a modern kitchen, refinished the oak floors and stripped the paint from the warm fir woodwork, replaced the wallpaper and allowed the ornate brass registers to glow once again -- and moreover, transformed a backyard wasteland into a pleasing peony-iris-daylily garden. I'm proud to say that we left the house in much better shape than we found it. Meanwhile the neighborhood, sad to say, did not improve along with us but spiraled downward. In 1973, when we arrived, three quarters of the 24 houses on our street were owner-occupied; when we departed in 2009, only four or five houses remained in family hands and the rest had devolved into rentals -- occupied and often over-occupied by CU students. Our block was representative of developments that took place on the Hill during our years of residence. While the Hill had once been an essentially peaceful place, with only a rare disturbance, by the turn of the century, it had deteriorated into a combat zone where we and our adult neighbors engaged in constant struggle with graffiti, overflowing trash bins, weedy untended lawns, noisy late night and early morning sleep-obliterating parties, neglected barking dogs, gratuitous intermittent fireworks (explosions, actually!), thefts, vandalism, as well as fraught face-to-face encounters with rude entitled young malefactors.

What had happened between 1969 and 2009? What caused the decline from a thriving pacific neighborhood to a disorderly student ghetto? There were a host of factors, a few of which I can enumerate. Probably most important is that the University added at least 10,000 students during those years and did not provide housing for a single soul. The Hill, just across Broadway, was easy pickings for enterprising landlords, many of them decent but some unscrupulous, who bought advantageously, and (inasmuch as rental licensing codes were largely ignored and unenforced), maximized their income by dividing dignified, solid old Victorian or Arts and Crafts homes into rabbit-warrens. Many of the new occupants were first-time-from-home students who came from far away, spent a semester or two boozed up and hung over, failed out, and left behind their tuition money, their damage, and their trash. What might have been profitable for CU was disastrous for the neighborhood. Along with the increase in the absolute number of students came a resurgence of fraternities. During the late 60s and early 70s, when many students opposed the Vietnam war and conceived themselves to be anti-establishment, fraternities were among the institutions that were disfavored. Membership in the frat clubs declined significantly, but then recovered with the coming of the more conservative, less troubled Reagan era. I need not dwell on the fact that the burgeoning fraternities, flaunting an ethic that was anti-intellectual and pro-alcohol, were a major cause of increased neighborhood disruption. Along with these factors, came the replacement of marijuana, the drug of choice during the antiwar era, with beer. Marijuana, at least in the mild varieties of the 70s, is a contemplative drug while beer is a noisy one.The turn to alcohol had the effect of increasing the number of bars at 13th and College; while there had only been a couple of drinking establishments when I arrived (Boulder had been "dry" until 1967), by the time I left, there were more than twenty such, and the area had become a drinking "destination" that attracted outsiders to the street and inevitably also to Hill fraternity and house parties. And then sometime during the 70s or perhaps early 80s, the University moved many classes from a Monday-Wednesday-Friday to a Monday-Wednesday schedule, which meant that the weekend, and weekend drinking, now began on Thursday night and continued until Monday morning. It was sometime during this period that a couple of national magazines proclaimed CU as the nation's Number One Party School, which I must assume negatively impacted its pool of applicants. In addition, the welcome liberation of women from oppressive social restrictions had an unintended consequence: it led to much more alcohol consumption by female students. What had once been a rarity -- a drunken woman -- became, I'm sorry to say, commonplace. (I had become accustomed to male revelers untrussing and pissing on my roses, but I was genuinely flabbergasted to see young women pull down their panties to squat on my front lawn). Still another factor was the advent of the cell phone, which made it easy for small nomadic bands of young people to find each other and rapidly coalesce into sprawling alcoholic hullabaloos. Both the city government and the university, two institutions that should have noticed these developments, remained supine and indifferent.

Then came the riots. In 1971 there had been a protest, which turned violent, against Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia. But the scary riots of the 80s lacked a political or social agenda -- as far I or anyone else could tell, they were meaningless expressions of anomie, anarchy, and vandalism. Asked for justification, students claimed that "there's nothing to do in Boulder but drink" -- an unpersuasive argument about one of the most prosperous small cities in the nation, one in which gymnasiums, theaters, libraries, hiking and climbing trails, swimming pools, and other recreational opportunities abound. The Hill experienced four riots in three years -- associated, if I remember correctly, with Hallowe'en or homecoming. Sloppy, reeling revelers crammed the streets, overturned vehicles, and hauled couches off porches to set dangerous street-corner fires. I remember one instance in which rioters on the prowl for fuel appropriated a substantial section of the wooden fence at the alley side of my lot. At last, the city took notice. A commission was empaneled to study and make recommendations. I attended a few of these meetings and was impressed by the seriousness with which the panel took its responsibilities. Members from the Hill neighborhood were Terry Rodrigue and Annie Fox. A report was issue and recommendations were made, but to no perceptible effect, and the deterioration continued. 

The riots led to the re-founding of the University Hill Neighborhood Association by the late Jane Stoyva, Rosemary Crowley, Steven Walsh, Lisa Spaulding, and  Eleanor DePuy, among many others. With my children now departed for college, I was able to become a contributing participant. Simply put, the Association was divided into two camps, which I thought of as the "enforcers" and the "socializers." The enforcers (among them Terry Rodgers, Gregg deBoever, and Ken Wilson) patrolled the neighborhood on Friday and Saturday nights, calling in violations to the police. The "socializers" (myself and many others) tried every which way to integrate the students into the community. In retrospect, neither the one nor the other technique had much of an impact.

Nevertheless, the effort to socialize the young folk had very beneficial social side-effects, at least for me. For example, I was a member of a small group (with Kathy Tucker, Terry Rodrigue, and LeRoy Leach) that established the annual Beach Park Party (does it still exist?). Not only did these neighbors, who had been until then no more than faces to me, become my friends, but I had the delightful experience, several years in succession, of dishing out free ice cream to both adults and children. It was my best job, ever. On 10th Street, Althea and I initiated an annual block party, where, for many successive Septembers, we explained to new arrivals over hamburgers and beans that they were welcome to the neighborhood but that they should respect the people with jobs and young children who also lived on the street. For three or four years I was part of a group that met monthly at The Academy, trying to figure out how to make use of that institution's resources to benefit the community. I made a lasting friend with one of the participants, Ron Roschke, then pastor of Grace Lutheran. I edited an upbeat, cheerful bi-monthly newsletter that was distributed throughout the hill to permanent and new residents alike. In addition, I represented aggrieved neighbors at restorative justice hearings, where young scamps were counseled by their practiced attorneys that to clear their records and escape punishment, all they needed to do was to grovel a bit and feign remorse. I attended and spoke at many City Council meetings. I made many friends by patrolling our street on Sunday mornings with a black plastic bag, picking up beer and soda cans, empty cigarette packs, those ubiquitous red beer cups, and various pieces of discarded clothing. (If there's a good reason why a bra should lie in the gutter on a weekend morning, I can't imagine what it might be.) I made my best Hill friend, Vin Scarelli, when we met at 2 AM, both of us on the hunt for "trumpet man" -- a student who like to pop out of his house in the wee hours, blow his trumpet (it might have been a bugle) as loud as possible, and then scurry inside before anyone could nab him. The reward for these activities was that I became member of a vibrant community -- and there's nothing like a common enemy to bring people together

I left the Hill in 2009 in part because I was exhausted by the fight but also because Althea's illness had progressed to the point that we needed to live on one floor, with an elevator.

I reside now in an age-appropriate downtown condo, but I regret that I can no longer walk around the block and enjoy a brief "how are you" with neighbors with whom I've collaborated on one project or another. I miss the society of the Hill, but not its disorder. Among its other virtues, there could have been no better place to raise children.

One might succumb to nostalgia -- except that when I sit on my Walnut Street balcony on a summer evening, I can hear distant booms coming from up there on the Hill, and I remember that they were exceedingly jarring and disturbing. The far off blasts remind me why I relocated and they cancel out any longing to return. But let me confess that if I were to come back to the Hill, I would return as a committed "enforcer."

Can the Hill be saved, or is it doomed to further decline?  There's no better location -- everything is at your doorstep -- schools, libraries, Chautauqua, foothills, all the diverse riches of a large University. It's a neighborhood of great architectural integrity -- an outdoor museum of 1900-1920 American design, almost as interesting as antebellum New Orleans or Art Nouveau Riga. Its housing stock is unparalleled in Boulder; in a better world, it would be a tourist destination. UHNA does a wonderful job of advocacy, but it's in an unequal contest with powerful political and business forces. I think it was during the 90s that a few of us, the late Neil King most prominently, tried to engage the university in an improve-the-Hill project. We proposed that the neighbors and the university (we hoped also for grant support) pitch in to create an entity that would buy houses on the Hill and rent them to, say, newly-arriving professors or staff who would otherwise be forced to commute from Lafayette -- nowadays, Erie or Ft Lupton. And by doing so little by little to undo and reverse the tipping point and rebalance the ratio of adults to students. Although Neil was persuasive and influential (he had once been city attorney), he could not develop any traction with either the city or CU. I am not sure if our plan was workable, but I learned that to save the Hill will not be easy and will require big money, big thinking, and the coordination of many disparate groups. 

In the meanwhile, the struggle between the  enforcers and the socializers continues. Should police educate or should they arrest and ticket our student hooligans?  Let's do both. If a new first year student arrives in Boulder on a Thursday, misbehaves during the weekend, and the following Monday forwards to his mommy and daddy the news of a $5000 fine -- well, that will certainly be educational, will it not?

My Life in Objects -- XIV (Puppy)

This woebegone object was once a plump and thriving stuffed animal -- a bear, in fact, though for some reason my children always called him "Puppy." Their only other stuffed animal, a snake, was named "Snakey." Pedestrian nicknames to be sure. I admit that our family wasn't very imaginative about naming our mascots.

Even though Puppy is past his prime, he's still a most treasured critter. If the house broke into flames, and I could only rescue one item, I'd have to grab Puppy and leave to their fates the jeweled goblets, the ancient diamond tiara, the Stradivarius, the Vermeers, and the First Folios. Puppy is more valuable.

Puppy looks as though he was abused, but it's not so. He was only loved to death. Because he was our only bear, the three children struggled for ownership. Poor Puppy was a field of combat. He was pulled, stretched, thrown, dunked, employed as a soccer ball, and in at least one memorable instance, voluminously vomited upon. Over the course of the decades, the sad fellow lost almost all his fur, his corneas, his entire snout, two-thirds of his stuffing, and both of his original ears. I myself attached two prosthetic leather ears, only one of which survives -- and also sewed on his asymmetrical leather mouth. In addition, early in Puppy's career, I performed a delicate musicboxectomy. 

Why only one stuffed bear to be struggled over? Why not three -- one apiece -- as would be sensible in families that hope to avoid sibling strife? Why the paucity of stuffed animals? Because both Althea and I came from families that were ideologically opposed to such indulgences. Grandma Anne, Althea's mother, wouldn't allow stuffed animals in her home because they were "unsanitary." My parents didn't much believe in toys of any kind -- kids were supposed to make their own entertainment out of pots and pans. (My father came from so impoverished a family that a stuffed bear would have been an inconceivable luxury.) Therefore my brothers and I grew up deprived of warm, furry, reassuring "transitional objects," which had no consequences whatsoever, for me, setting aside the periodic gloom and the vast existential void in my soul.

Puppy is now in my care because my children can't decide to whom he properly belongs. I hope they don't fight over him after I die -- he can't take any more pummeling. I stow Puppy in a drawer of the old Irish desk, but because of his long service to the family, he deserves much better. Rightly, Puppy should lie in state, ensconced in an illuminated lucite display case atop a stately jasper or malachite plinth. 

"Bisson Conspectuities"

"Bisson conspectuities" is one of my all-time favorite Shakespearean oxymorons. Although it's not as transparent as, say, "hot ice" or "living death," it's much more quirky and colorful. "Bisson conspectuities" appears in Coriolanus in one of the scenes in which Menenius banters with the Roman crowd. They attack and he parries by enumerating his own strengths and weaknesses. He concludes with an insult that flaunts his patrician education: "What harm can your bisson conspectuities glean out of this character?" (In this case, a "character" is a summary statement of a person's habits or nature, a "characterization".)

The odd word "conspectuities" is an invention of Shakespeare's. He derived it from the participial form of the Latin verb "conspicio" -- to observe, gaze, or watch. It's a nonce word, a hapax legomenon; unlike some of Shakespeare's more inspired coinages, conspectuities never domesticated into English -- the OED lists only this sole appearance. "Bisson," on the other hand, which means "blind," was not new to the language but was in fact an ancient word of Germanic origin -- and already obsolescent in 1608, although the venerable proverb "the bysom ledys the blynde" might still have been current in the provinces. In Hamlet, the deliberately archaizing First Player uses the expression "bisson rheum" for "blinding tears." 

"Bisson conspectuities" means "blind sight" or "blear vision." It's an especially striking oxymoron because its component parts are drawn from opposite ends of the word hoard -- old and new, plain and polysyllabic, Germanic and Latin, rustic and citified.

But there's a complication. The word "bisson" doesn't actually appear in the Folio; there it is "beesome." "Beesome, usually spelled besom, meant and still means, "broom." But in the context of Coriolanus, broom is meaningless; and so, beginning  with Lewis Theobald in the 1720s, editors have uniformly substituted "bisson" -- an inspired conjecture but still a guess. It's possible that Shakespeare wrote "bisson" and a scrivener or printer incorrectly read 'beesome" -- but perhaps not. An oxymoron of transcendent genius might be merely an illusion -- a creation not of Shakespeare but of editorial tradition.

"Bisson conspectuities" puts quite a burden on members of the Blackfriar's audience. It's hard to believe that Shakespeare thought his first hearers would grasp the phrase's meaning on the fly. It's easy for us to understand it now, four hundred years later, with a treasury of annotations at the foot of every page. Perhaps Shakespeare didn't care if the audience comprehended? Is it possible that he was writing just for his own delight, for his pleasure in words? For readers rather than playgoers? Or perhaps he had already divined that he was writing for enthusiasts and scholars of a latter age.

Jot and Tittle

First of all, let us dismiss the notion that Charles Dickens invented a pair of persnickety punctilious accountants and named them Jot and Tittle. Sorry, it could or should have been the case, but it's not so. Nevertheless, both "jot" and "tittle," often found in each other's cozy company, have stories to tell.

Take jot, for example. In the masterful "seduction scene" in Shakespeare's Othello, Iago first torments the Venetian general and then pretends sympathy: "I see this (i.e. his nasty sly hints that Desdemona has been a-bed with Cassio) hath a little dashed your spirits." Othello responds defensively, perhaps a tad dishonestly: "Not a jot, not a jot."

The noun "jot" is not obsolete but it's not common either. What is a jot? A tiny bit, a shred, a whit, a speck, a scintilla, a mite, a trace, a skoch, an inkling, a dollop. Smaller by far than a mere smidgeon. But in its root meaning, was a jot a measure of liquid, such as an ounce? or of weight, such as a gram? A measure of distance?  A measure of time: "I'll be with you in just a jot."

Professor Google tells me it's none of those things and that I am entirely off track. "Jot" is alphabetic; it translates the Greek "iota," the smallest letter -- no more than a single straight line, a minimal minim. And therefore Othello might just as well have said (the words are cognates), "Not an iota, not an iota." He might have said it, that is, if he hadn't spent his dearest action in the tented field engaging exclusively in broils and battles, but instead had studied at some North African classical academy.

In fact, Shakespeare either didn't know or didn't use the word "iota," which seems not to have entered English until a generation after he ceased putting quill to paper. On the other hand, Shakespeare was mighty fond of the word jot, which he employed at least twenty times (though never so notably as in Othello), always to denote a small quantity and frequently to appear as a partitive: "jot of promise," "jot of ceremony," "jot of color," "jot of pleasure," "jot of blood.'" Shakespeare's "jot" can even signify a moment in time: "No, faith, I'll not stay a jot longer." (His "jot" is always a noun, never the converted verb meaning "to write a few words quickly.")

Shakespeare undoubtedly knew the word "jot" from its famous and mysterious appearance in Matthew 5:18. Here's the familiar King James Version (1611): "For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." The phrasing is almost the same in the Geneva Bible of 1576 -- the translation that Shakespeare himself knew and used. "For truly I say unto you, Till heaven and earth perish, one jot or one tittle of the Law shall not escape, till all things be fulfilled."

I don't know what "all things" are and I certainly don't know what is meant by "fulfilled." But why should I, since Jesus's prophesy has long baffled trained professional theologians. But I do know that the pairing of "jot and tittle" has become proverbial.

What, then, is a "tittle." No, it's not a very small female breast. Nor is it a diminutive seabird, though it's not difficult to imagine a rocky south Atlantic island frequented by the "Lesser, or Little Tittle." In actual fact, it's a stroke of a pen -- and one that's even smaller than an iota. Specifically, it's the dot over the lower case "i" or lower case "j." Or, in an extended sense, any simple diacritical mark. 

Shakespeare used "tittle" just twice. The first was in Love's Labor's Lost in a passage in which Shakespeare makes game of affected language. Pompous Don Armado de Adriano compares little things (the woman he woos) to greater things (himself) "Shall I entreat thy love? I will. What shalt thou exchange for rags? robes; for tittles? titles; for thyself? me." What a difference a "t" makes! "Tittle" makes its second, almost inadvertent, appearance in The Winter's Tale as an element in the dismissive reduplicative "tittle-tattling." Both of Shakespeare's tittles acknowledge that the word is an inherently silly one. Is it accidental that a number of words that resemble tittle are frivolous or infantile: babble, toddle, tattle, prattle?   

"Tittle" smacks of triviality. It lacks heft. It would have been a literary disaster, a catastrophe of the first order, if Othello had responded to Iago not with "Not a jot, not a jot," but with "not a tittle, not a tittle." 

[October 29]  Otis Brown responds: "Dr. M.: you've forgotten the most famous Tittle of all: Yelberton Abraham. How could you?

[November 2]  Vivian de St. Vrain responds:

 

Year of the Rooster

The rooster came to our attention about a month ago. We heard him before we saw him. He was living at the edge of the forest, about one hundred yards from the house. After a few days he became bolder and we were able to catch a glimpse now and then. He's a Barred Rock, fully mature, with a bright red comb and superior wattles, but with woeful tail feathers. We don't know from where he came. We asked around but none of the neighbors is missing a rooster. We guessed: he's an escapee, or, perhaps his owner became tired of him and kicked him out of the truck, or (my favorite theory) he was in a rooster fight, lost his tail feathers and retired to the woods in shame. But in fact, we have no idea how he came to settle on our property.

Little by little he started to become more comfortable with us. He would spend his day in the flower garden, furtively eating insects. He was especially fond of earwigs. A good occupation, I thought. No harm except to the bugs. Eventually he came to tolerate our presence. He would sit a few yards away, studying me while I weeded. He gained our respect, because he managed to survive even though the forest is filled with foxes and fisher cats and weasels and coyotes and the air is patrolled by hawks. He liked to visit the donkeys and peck around their manure piles.  When he started to roost not in the forest but in the blueberry bushes close to the house I became concerned -- this may be more of a rooster guest than I need. And then he took up the habit of cock-a-doodle-do-ing at dawn just outside our bedroom window. And during afternoon nap time. And familiarizing himself with the vegetable garden, where he snacks on cucumbers. (He loves cucumbers.) He became ever more bold -- a few days ago he was just outside the kitchen, pecking on the glass door, hoping, I imagine, to be let inside. And when I didn't let him in, he left a large retaliatory splash of rooster dropping right at the doorway.

We looked out of the small north window of our bedroom and there he was perched on the railing, peering in. A peeping-Tom rooster. (Did he catch an eyeful!!) 

One day a near neighbor telephoned: "Your rooster is here."  "He's not my rooster."  

And then he disappeared. For the first time in a month, there was no crowing at dawn.  OK, we thought, some predator got him. One of these days, we'll stumble upon a bunch of black and white feathers in the forest.

But then a friend who lives on Ira's Pinnacle told us that he had seen a pair of chickens on Hackett Hill Road about a half a mile up the road. He couldn't be sure, but he figured it must be "your" rooster and a hen. 

So that's where he's been!! He's a gallinaceous gallant gallivanting with the local ladies. I thought, good for him; I don't have to concern myself with him any longer. He'll go feral and start a family. He must not know about Vermont winters.

But not so. This morning he was back, solitary, crowing vigorously outside my window. His romance, if it were a romance, didn't work out. I can't imagine why because he's become quite a handsome bird. He personable, friendly and he's grown an an impressive new set of tail feathers. He's plump and shiny; his walk, once furtive, has become a decisive strut. There he is now, cock-a-doodling his head off in the patch of cucumbers.

Side Effects

LENFERA is generally safe to use, but possible side effects include stuffy or runny nose, headaches, goosebumps, hiccups, cramps, sensitivity to bright lights or glare, shingles, gingivitis, numbness of lips or upper palate, dry scalp, ringing in the ears (tinnitus), acid reflux, dizziness, hair loss, hearing loss, kidney stones, constipation and/or diarrhea, sudden loss or gain of weight, inability to swallow, drooling, desiccation, macular degeneration, bunions, uncontrollable twitching or muscle spasms, rectal itch, toenail fungus, nausea, abdominal pain, difficulty with breathing, edema, fistula, halitosis, absence of libido, tachycardia, swelling in knees or other joints, scabiosa, bots, flatulence, loss of insight, roseola, Osceola, bloat, priapism, Purim, bowel obstructions, failure to thrive, scoliosis, creeping phlox, aggression, acne, increased facial or body hair, world-weariness, dyspepsia, rash, fatigue, agoraphobia, lycanthropy, fever, tremors, blurred vision or sudden blindness, frostbite, ringworm, procrastination, irritability, hot flashes, mange, barnacles, pellagra, night sweats, bladderwort, paranoia, clumsiness, thrush, zeugma, migraine, feelings of humiliation, heart arrest, tuatara, memory loss, white nose, rapture, paralysis, stage fright, bioluminescence, scurvy, hallucinations, chancre, catarrh, pink eye, red eye, rabies, insomnia, nightmares, spontaneous combustion, Coggins, blurring of gender identity, wasting disease, aphasia, blackouts, suicidal ideation, nosebleeds, woe, catatonia, gangrene, acute pain, multiple organ failure, death.

If symptoms persist, consult your physician.

LENFERA has been approved by the FDA.

Zeus: the Apology

If I've offended anyone, I'm really sorry. I didn't mean to; I have tremendous respect for pretty and desirable women. 10s, all of them. So let me just start by saying that many years ago, decades or centuries I can't remember exactly when, I had a thunderous crush on Io. She claims that she signaled me that she wasn't interested, but I did not stop. You know, when you're a god, they let you do it. You can do anything. It was probably a mistake to have turned her into a heifer but I think she enjoyed it then -- even if she complains about it now. Same thing with Leda; it's possible that I misinterpreted her but I honestly thought that her "no" meant "maybe" or "yes," so I turned myself into a swan and grabbed her by the pussy. Maybe I should have backed off, especially since she had already spent that same night with her husband Tyndareus, who had, as everyone knows, very small hands, if you know what I mean. It's good to be a god. And then there was Semele. I mean, she was one of my very own priestesses, and I realize now that your own priestesses ought to be off limits. But she provoked me by bathing nude in the river Asopus. And I happened to be flying by in the shape of an eagle. What happened, happened. It was definitely wrong of her to ask to look at me face to face and I regret that I incinerated her, but it wasn't my fault. Europa was also an error, but she should have known better than to come near to me when I'm in the shape of a white bull. And the same with Taygete who came to me as a doe with golden horns. I couldn't stop myself. I've always had a thing for golden horns, though I think Pindar made a bit too much of it. And then there was Dia, who happened by, so she says, when I was in the shape of a stallion. What can you expect of a stallion? Alcmene, that's another story. She was tall and beautiful, with eyes that reminded me of Aphrodite. I definitely wanted her. I had to disguise myself as her husband Amphitryon to make love to her. Maybe it was wrong to do so, but I don't think she ever figured out what actually happened, which kind of excuses me. And then there was my adventure with Antiope, where I disguised myself as a satyr; and once you're a satyr well, you know, a satyr does what a satyr does. To seduce Callisto, I had to transform myself into Artemis, which sounds a little like girl-on-girl action, but it really wasn't because it was me. Come to think of it, I can't remember exactly how we did it. And also: I blame Acrisius for shutting up his daughter Danae in a bronze tower. I took it as a deliberate provocation. I had to sneak through an air vent to impregnate Danae in the form of a shower of golden rain, which, I have to tell you, wasn't entirely satisfying and just a little bit kinky.

But what can I say?  I don't want to play the victim, because, after all, I am a god, but I had a hard childhood, what with my father castrating my grandfather and then me being suckled by the goat Amalthea. You get off to a bad start when you're suckled by a goat. 

What I Said at Our "Event"

"Thank you all for coming. We appreciate it more than you can possibly imagine. We've needed, and relied on, the support that all of you have given us.

It's no secret that both Lynn and I have gone through some difficult times. It's good to host a cheerful event.    

A number of people have asked us about our use of the word "wed" in the invitation that we sent to you. (We said, you remember, that we were 'wed" on June 30). I don't want to mislead you. We didn't mean to imply that we involved either state or church in our relationship. There didn't seem to be any point for us to get married legally. People marry for the sake of children, but we've decided that we're not going to have children.

Here's the story. Lynn and I wanted to acknowledge in a public way the seriousness and permanence of our friendship -- for our families, and, I think, especially for our grandchildren (there are ten of them). We wanted our families to know that our relationship wasn't like some streetcar or trolley that you hop on and hop off. So we decided to invite our most nuclear family to Lynn's backyard garden for a brief "ceremony" -- just my children and grandchildren, her children and grandchildren, her brother, my brother, the various spouses -- and pledge our love and fidelity. But then one of my daughters-in-law, Connie, said that we couldn't ask people to fly in from all over the USA just for a five minute ceremony. She suggested that we at least exchange rings. It seemed like a good idea. So we walked over to Classic Facets on the Pearl Street Mall and bought two not antique but vintage rings -- because we're vintage people. Handsome rings, as you can see. And then as long as everyone was coming here a day early we decided that we should have dinner the night before. And if you're going to have a dinner you might as well have some music. So gradually the "ceremony" evolved and grew. But more importantly -- and here's the point -- the meaning of the event evolved as well. It became more significant, more profound, more intimate. We never liked the phrase "commitment ceremony" or even the word "commitment" because it sounds as though you are being sent either to jail or to a mental institution, and we didn't have the vocabulary for what we intended to do. But little by little, while we planned the event, and even more so, after we performed the ceremony, we began to feel more and more married -- in all the positive senses of the word. We can now say "wed" and mean it. I haven't yet been able to say "husband" or "wife" but I suspect that one day in the not too distant future those words will manifest themselves. But the point is that in all the ways that matter, we are "wed."

When my Vermont friend Bert, who's just my age, got married 18 years ago, I said to him, Bert, is it real --that you're head over heels in love at age 60? At the time, it seemed so improbable. But now, here I am, just a year and a half short of 80, and setting out on a new life. And 60 seems like dewy youth.  

So let me repeat to you now what I said to Lynn on June 30. "I bring you my children and my grandchildren, my prosthetic tooth, my lens implants, my hearing aids, my non-standard but warm heart, and I take you and your children and grandchildren and your titanium hip and arthritic finger and I say, "let us make a life of it."

And let me just add that between us we have been married for 100 years (an average of 50 apiece). So we ought to know what we're doing.

And what we're going to do is to ride this old trolley right to the end of the line."

World War II Memories

I was six years old when the war ended in 1945, so my memories are few and arise in no particular order. I remember hearing news reports on the radio that were datelined "Moscow"-- but I conflated Moscow with Bosco, a brand of chocolate syrup popular in the 1940s. I remember that the floor of our kitchen was disfigured with an infinite number of black marks -- rubber was in short supply and the substituted soles left nasty blotches. My mother said, "We'll wait until the war is over to replace the linoleum." Many commodities were in short supply: instead of butter there was a white oleomargerine into which a packet of orange food color was mashed to simulate a credible yellow. There were ration books and ration stamps for gasoline and sugar and coffee and greens. My mother was furious that Mr. Lerner, who owned the fruit and vegetable shop on 18th Avenue, sold black-market lettuces from the back of his store. A bus driver was rude to a passenger; my mother said: "all the decent young men are overseas." We saved our nickels and brought money to school to buy war bonds. Following government advice, my father dug up his carefully tended lawn and planted a "victory garden" of vegetables. There were frequent blackouts: my father's friend Jack Patent sported a white hard hat because he was a warden. My Uncle Dan, a major in the Army Air Corps, came home from the Burma border for a thirty-day furlough and showed me his captured German Luger. We received air mail letters from him and from other soldiers with details blacked out by military censors. I complained to my mother: "Mrs. Callery (my first grade teacher) isn't nice to me." My mother said, "You have to forgive her; she's lost four of her boys in the war." Lost?  Four of her boys? I did not understand. On a sunny spring day in 1945, we heard on the radio that President Roosevelt was dead; my mother sat on the stoop and cried. And in August of that same year, when our family was visiting someone on a lake somewhere, all of a sudden the adults who had motor boats were zooming back and forth and shouting and laughing. I asked what was happening and my father said, "the war is over." 

Uncle Jack's tank was demolished by German cannon fire and he was the crew's only survivor. He lived with shrapnel in his brain until the age of ninety-one. Cousin Saul's older brother was killed in New Guinea, but Sarah, his mother, "knew" that he was alive and waited for the knock on the door or the telephone call until the end of her days. Meanwhile, the poor fellow's bones lay bleaching at Buna or some other long-forgotten field of battle. Before the war, my mother told me, we used to receive mail from the old country -- from the many members of the Chafetz and Tomaszewski and Middlebank and Hessel families who had stayed behind. "But after the war, nothing."

Can we, even now, bear to imagine what became of all those Malkas and Rifkas and Levs and Mendels?   

My Teachers: James Hutton (1902-1980)

The most erudite man that I ever encountered in my own person was James Hutton, a professor of classics when I was an undergraduate at Cornell back there in the 1950s. Professor Hutton bristled with knowledge -- nor is this my opinion only, but one that is well attested by his international reputation and by the list of his writings. Hutton wrote two enormous books (800 pages each!!) that won him his scholarly spurs: The Greek Anthology in Italy (1935) and The Greek Anthology in France and in the Latin Writers of the Netherlands to the Year 1800 (1946). I encountered Professor Hutton in 1958 when, callow and poorly educated, I enrolled in a Latin course called "Terence and Catullus" (of which more later). But first, for those curious readers out there in bloglandia who are on tenterhooks, painfully stretched like new wool and are wondering what the heck is the "Greek Anthology" about which James Hutton composed his pair of magna opera and around which his life centered -- turn we now to the pages of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

In brief, the Anthologia Graeca is a collection of poems, mostly epigrams, that had a complicated ancient history, but originated perhaps with an anthology complied by Meleager of Gadara in the first century BCE, which brought together works by many ancients including Archilochus, Alcaeus, Anacreon and Simonides (all big names in their time). There were a series of early editions that do not survive but an authoritative version was made by Constantine Cephalas in the 10th century. "Cephalas appended a number of other collections: homoerotic verse collected by Straton of Sardis in the 2nd century AD; a collection of  Christian epigrams found in churches; a collection of satirical and convivial epigrams collected by Diogenianus as well as Christodorus's description of statues in the Byzantine gymnasium of Zeuxippos; and a collection of inscriptions from a temple in Cyzicus." And then in 1300 or thereabouts Maximus Planudes brought together an edition which became standard, which, while adding some poems, also deleted or bowdlerized many of those that offended his puritanical Christian sensibilities. Planudes' anthology was the only one known to Western Europe for many centuries; manuscript transmission was superseded when an edition based on his work was printed in 1494.

There's a lot more but that's enough information for us to understand the area which James Hutton worked. Professor Hutton knew the anthology backwards and forwards and made it his business to trace its considerable influence through the Latin and vernacular poetry of late antiquity and the medieval and renaissance worlds. Quite an endeavor, in my opinion.  

Hutton was a Scotsman, born in Airth, son of a sea captain, though from where I sat (in a small seminar room in Goldwin Smith Hall!!), it was impossible to imagine that he had ever been a child or even a young man. He came to the US early in life and there was not a trace of Scotland in his speech. Hutton entered Cornell as a freshman in 1920, received three degrees there, stayed on to teach, and retired in 1973. According to his Cornell obituary, he was a life-long bachelor. For most of his adulthood, he lived with his mother, Mrs. Elizabeth Hutton, and he shared a house for many years with Professor Lane Cooper, his teacher and another bachelor Cornell classicist. After the death of his mother and of Cooper, he continued to live at 123 Roberts Place with his cousin/housekeeper, Mrs. Margaret Green. Perhaps he was a delightful presence among his friends, but to my eyes he was a pale, tall, gaunt, dry-as-a stick, bony man devoid of humor or juice. Born only two years before my own father, he seemed to be generations older.  

Now a few words about Terence and Catullus, the twin subjects of my 1958 Latin classroom experience. 

Terence (Publius Terentius Afer) was Roman playwright possibly of Berber origin but certainly originally a north African slave. Brought to Rome and freed, he wrote six comedies, adapted from Greek originals, of which we students of Professor Hutton plowed through three: Andria (166 BC); The Self-Tormentor (163 BC) and the Adelphi (160 BC). Terence drowned on a trip to Greece, age 25. His must have been a marvelously romantic life, even though much curtailed. Too bad we know only its barest outline.

Here's the title page to the first "modern" edition of Terence's works (1496)

In Terence's plays, young noblemen dally with prostitutes or mistresses even as their fathers insist that they marry more respectable ladies. Plots, often contrived by the dull hero's wily slave, fail to come to fruition because the conspirators are carelessly overheard. Sometimes apparently unrelated women (one rich, the other poor), turn out to be sisters. Sham marriages and double-dealing are frequent. It is not uncommon that sons discover by accident, in the last scene of the play, the identities of their biological fathers. When there are plans to destroy female infants, the girls are rescued and raised secretly, only to come forward as beauties at a critical juncture of the plot. Young noblemen are prone to breaking into the houses of pimps to carry off the girls they love. Generally, plays end with multiple and suitable marriages, the old folks outwitted and the youngsters carrying the day. Slaves are freed.

Meanwhile, characters coin memorable aphorisms in succinct, elegant Latin. Everyone knows "Homo sum, nihil a me alienum puto"  -- I am a man, nothing human is alien to me.  But also quot homines tot sententiae: suus cuique mos -- So many men, as many opinions; to each his own way. And "fortis fortuna adiuvat" --  fortune favors the brave.  And "nullumst iam dictum quod nos dictum sit prius" --nothing new is said that has not been said before. And "amantium irae amoris integratio est" -- lover's quarrels are the renewal of love.

But with all these comic goings-on and witty sayings, there was not one moment that I can remember when Professor James Hutton laughed or smiled or indicated in the least that the plays were clever or amusing. Instead, we discussed grammatical questions with much emphasis on the differences between second century and first century Latin. Dry as dust, it was. The opportunity to find the common humanity of ancient Romans and 1950s Cornellians was missed, even shirked.

Terence's louche and lively plots must have posed a problem for Professor Hutton; Catullus of Verona, a poet of love and sex and bawdy, could only have caused even more of a difficulty. In the edition in which we read Catullus, a drab gray book which must have dated from the early part of the century, certain of the more scabrous poems were omitted but, in a moment of confused prudery, printed -- in a smaller font --in an appendix. I suspect that they were also bowdlerized. Some of the words that Catullus used in his freer verse were not to be found in our dictionary, which had also been cleansed. And in a translation that I consulted (was it the Loeb?) the offending poems did appear, but only in Italian. Was the idea that if anyone could read Italian he must be sophisticated enough to deal with Catullan pornography. Perhaps my readers think that I'm fantasizing or imagining this half-hearted censorship, but it's as true as true. Swear.

Even after all these years, two of Catullus's poems stay in my mind. The best, the most frequently republished and the most influential is known to classicists as Catullus 5. It's a remarkable poem. Here's the Latin, which is not difficult.

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus

Rumoresque senum severiorum

omnes unius aestimemus assis.

Soles occidere et redire possunt;

nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux

Nox est perpetua una dormienda

da mi basia mille, deinde centum

dein mille altera, dein secunda centum

deinde com milia multa fecerimus

conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus, 

aut ne quis malus invidere possitor

cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

And here's a translation. "Let us live, my Lesbia, and love. The gossipings of stern old men let us value at just one penny.  Suns may set and rise again, but us, when once the brief light has set, night is one perpetual sleep. Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand, then a second hundred, then yet another thousand, then a hundred, then when we have counted up many thousands, let us shake [the abacus] lest some evil man be envious when he knows how many kisses there were." That is to say, Let us keep on making love no matter what the old envious guys think. (Lesbia has nothing to do with lesbians; it's just code for the name of the married woman with whom Catullus was sleeping.)  

I have no recollection of any discussion of this peach of a poem in 1958. Perhaps we talked about the ingenious lux/Nox juxtaposition, but I am sure we didn't touch on either the boasted adultery or the joys of sex. We were still in the last gasp of Victoriana. We were pre-Beatles, pre-Kennedy, pre-readily available contraceptives. Some things were not to be discussed. 

The other poem that stands in my memory is Catullus 61, a joyous epithalamion (or marriage song) which celebrates, with great gusto, the wedding of Vinia and Manlius. It is sensual and almost hypnotic. It's frankness about sexual pleasure pleased me in 1958, when such things were rare. Still pleases me.

But what about the omitted poems, the ones too "coarse" for our tender eyes and ears?  How would James Hutton have dealt with them. Not at all, of course. But now, censorship and self-censorship and propriety eased, we can read the poem that begins Paedicabo ego vos et irrumabo. which I can now translate as "I will fuck you in the ass and then fuck you in the face." And goes on from there. Not part of the 1958 curriculum. In Professor Hutton's class, we were more comfortable discussing a synezis of the genitive than any exercise of the genitalia.

But I wonder, now, about, James Hutton, at home after a hard day of declining and conjugating, at dinner with his mother and his bachelor roommate. What did Professor Hutton think about Catullus's "paedicabo ego vos et irrumabo".

This I know: whether repelled or offended or secretly sympathetic, he certainly did not share his feelings with his students. 

Another Gosse-Pearlman Xmas

And so we've come to the end of the "holiday season" once again.

Another Christmas, another winter solstice, another St. Lucy's day with its deepest of midnights. Even here in ever-sunny Colorado, things are a bit gloomy. However, I have every confidence that another spring is just around the corner. I don't need to bring greenery into the house in order to prevent the dragon from swallowing the sun. The days, now so abbreviated, will lengthen and in five weeks we'll see the first crocuses and a week later the daffodils and pussy-willows. It's going to happen. But as always, the last days of the year challenge me.

I'm relieved and happy that Christmas and the whole Christmas business is done and gone. No one wants to be a scrooge and I don't want to frown on carols and gift-giving and plum-puddings and good fellowship, but in my heart, let me confess, I don't like the holiday. I can't make sense of the virgin birth or the sacrifice of the only-begotten son. I don't even respect the story-- to me it's just dressed-up scapegoating. Moreover, Jesus' revolutionary message about caring for the poor seems to be ignored or repudiated by Christianity's most vociferous advocates. And then there's all that incongruous stuff that has accreted around Christmas -- the hype and the commercialism and the religious chauvinism and the reindeer and the tactless triumphalism. It's both incomprehensible and offensive to me.

And I'm in good company. I have allies. Let us go back to the beginning of the American experience with Christmas.

If the profoundly religious seventeenth-century founders of our country had a single favorite Biblical moment, it's when the Lord (speaking through His prophet Amos) severely condemned the vanity of holidays. "I hate," said the Lord, "I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies." The Lord of Hosts specifically enjoined against the attempt to placate him by sacrificing animals (a matter of topical concern in Amos's time). "Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them; neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts." Nor did He rest with these easy-to-follow injunctions, but He went on to condemn all musical tributes as well. Nor more chants, glees or carols: "Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols." Our Puritan forefathers recognized that the Lord opposed not only rituals and music but all formal observances and rote piety. The Ancient of Days was moved not by empty ceremony but by right action and good behavior. Instead of squeaking timbrels and sounding brass, why, "let justice run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream." Taking these uncompromising sentences as their guide, our founders dug in their heels against the ostentatious celebration of all holidays, especially Christmas.

I applaud the old guy, the Father, and I revere Amos. His mantra bears repeating: "Let justice come down as the waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream." 

The neglect of "righteousness" in favor of buying things makes me melancholy. I would be happy to see fewer purchases and more good deeds. It would help us through the dark months.

The winter solstice is a sensitive time for me because it's the anniversary of my father's birthday. He arrived to no poorer family on the planet on the darkest day of the year, the twenty-second of December, 1904. ‘And they called his name Emanuel, God with us,’ -- but whether by accident or design, I have no idea. My father lived a long and just life. He had many virtues -- one of them that he was the least materialistic person ever. He had no possessions and craved none. But he was righteous.

I don't know how anyone could write a biography of Emanuel, my father. There was so little plot, so little conflict in his life. He went about his business, raised his family, kept to the straight and narrow. His memory is a blessing to us.

At this time of the year I turn once again to one of the most challenging fathers in literature. The voluminous works of Sir Edmund Gosse are not much read nowadays except by specialists in Edwardian literature, but Father and Son (1907) still stands as one of the world's great autobiographies. 

The father in Father and Son is the biologist Philip Henry Gosse, whom Charles Darwin once called "an honest hod carrier of science." The older Gosse was a minister and a leader of the Plymouth Brethren, a very strict, very puritanical splinter of English Protestantism -- one that could easily have taken Amos as its prophet and leader. According to his son Edmund, P. H. Gosse held that the celebration of Christmas was "nothing less than an act of idolatry. The very word is Popish, [my father] used to exclaim, 'Christ's Mass!' Then he would adduce the antiquity of the so-called feast, adapted from horrible heathen rites, and itself a soiled relic of the abominable Yule-Tide. He would denounce the horrors of Christmas until it almost made me [that is, Philip Henry's son Edmund Gosse the autobiographer] blush to look at a holly berry." 

A passionate man, Philip Henry Gosse. A difficult father. Can we Imagine how Philip Henry Gosse would have suffered to behold a twentieth-century American Christmas: muzaked "Silent Night" in a shopping mall. Or even --horror of horrors --the odious, saccharine "Little Drummer Boy." There's not a sappier song in all of creation.

In Father and Son, Sir Edmund recollects a Christmas of his youth. One boyish year he defied his father and, putting his immortal soul in danger, secretly ate some Christmas plum-pudding that had been offered to him by 'rebellious' servants. But then, overcome with guilt and stomach-ache, he flew to his father, crying out "Oh! Papa, Papa, I have eaten of flesh offered to idols!" Philip Henry then "ran with me into the midst of the startled servants, seized what remained of the pudding,... and ran till we reached the dust-heap, when he flung the idolatrous confectionery on to the middle of the ashes, and then raked it deep down into the mass." 

A frightening episode for a nine-year-old -- but beautifully told. Only an accomplished writer of comedy (and one who was steeped in Dickens) could have invented a phrase as marvelous as "idolatrous confectionery," where the triviality of the noun undermines the high seriousness of the adjective.

Compared to Amos and to the Plymouth Brethren and to Philip Henry Gosse, my own resistance to Christmas is trivial. I'm a dissenter, but a dissenter in moderation.

In fact, I'm not even a Puritan -- I'm delighted with the baked ham and the sweet potatoes. Moreover, I have devised a Christmas custom of my own. Every December 25, I reserve three hours to listen to Handel's Messiah -- not out of piety or reverence, but because the oratorio is so marvelous that it's almost -- almost -- sacred.

There are many Messiahs, but In our house, the performance of choice is, inevitably, the extremely intelligent Pearlman version (Boston Baroque Orchestra and Chorus-- Martin Pearlman, Conductor [Telarc 80322]). Blessings and honor and glory and hallelujahs be unto George Frederick Handel and unto his unsurpassed oratorio.

So this year and every year: rejoice greatly but appropriately, ye sons and daughters of Zion! 

"Barefoot to Palestine"

I'm enchanted by a sentence in Othello that is spoken by Desdemona's lady-in-waiting, Emilia. She's helping Desdemona to undress and the two women are engaged in informal chat. Desdemona, perhaps wondering why she had the misfortune to fall in love with exotic Othello, allows her mind to wander. It comes to rest on a countryman of hers, a good-looking man named Ludovico. And then her interlocutor Emilia praises handsome Ludovico in words that should compel every sentient being to gasp in astonishment and admiration.

About Ludovico, Emilia makes a remarkable claim: "I know a lady in Venice would have walked barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip."

All that needs to be said is, wow! But let me try to explain why the sentence so transfixes me.  

It's hyperbole, but not the ordinary hyperbole of largest or smallest or coolest or most awesome. It's a hyperbole beyond hyperbole. A lesser writer might have said, "I know a lady who would have walked a long way to make love to him." Not Shakespeare. For "a long way," Shakespeare give us "barefoot to Palestine"; for "make love" he offers "a touch of his nether lip." It's extravagant and wheeling.

A hike, shod, to the holy land, would have been a long and exacting journey. Barefoot, beyond belief. The evocative word "Palestine" infuses religion and sanctity into a sentence about sex and desire -- and therefore generates a love-longing that is as powerful, as silly, and as ill-planned as a crusade. And for what aim? Not even, for this mythical lady hiker, a big, zonking, mouth-filling kiss; simply for the merest contact of lips. No, not even lips, just one lip -- the lower one. It's an hyperbole of minimalism.

In the poetry that Shakespeare knew from his childhood, it was men who would make the vows and undergo the trials to court their beautiful ladies. But this lovely sentence reverses the convention. It is, so to speak, Sadie Hawkins day in Venice. 

Emilia elsewhere asserts that women have desires as strong as lovers of the other sex; here she demonstrates that women's love-longing can be as ridiculous (and as powerful) as men's. 

And everyone who knows Othello will hear in the word "Palestine" an intimation of the violent act that once, many years ago, shook Aleppo.

Baseball, 1955 and 2012

In 1955, Duke Snider lived at 178 Marine Avenue (in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge). His was the middle house in this picture.

Gil Hodges lived here, at 1120 32 Street. Two floors, 1400 square feet. 

 
Harold "Pee Wee" Reese and family made their home in 970 square feet of 9714 Barwell Terrace. Carl Erskine's home, at 9318 Lafayette Walk, was even smaller,

   

just 910 square feet.

Sandy Amoros lived in Bed-Stuy, in this brownstone at 147 Bainbridge Street, most likely on just one of the three floors. His was the leftmost building.

 

 And here is Alex Rodriguez's 2012 house in Miami, Florida.  It's up for sale for $38,000,000,

      

which is what 19,681 square foot waterfront properties go for nowadays. A bargain, for all I know.

De Sternuente, or, Of Sneezing

I enjoy fighting off a sneeze. It takes practice and concentration. When the sneeze urge emerges, without warning, the battle is joined. On the side of the sneeze -- dust or some other foreign particles passing through the nasal hairs, reaching  the nasal mucosa, releasing a flood of histamines which irritate the nerve cells and signal the brain to stimulate the trigeminal network and activate the pharyngeal and tracheal muscles, producing a noisy, 100-mile-an-hour blast of microbes and snot. On the side of restraint -- nothing but enormous personal discipline and the desire not to surrender to animal nature. There are some, who are less committed to mind-over-body, who employ the fingertips to pinch the end of the nose, or, alternatively, who press a knuckle against the philtrum, the infranasal depression which Shakespeare, curiously, called "the valley" -- but frankly, when it comes to resisting sternutation, digital success is only half a loaf. It's far more rewarding to think one's way to a rare victory in the lifelong sneezomachia. Not to sneeze is a triumph of the will.

Which is not to assert that a good sneeze gives no pleasure, if a person would give oneself over to it. It's simply that the sneeze, especially one of the window-rattling variety, is entirely anarchic and inartistic, which might be why there is so slight a sneeze literature. Although hard to believe, it's a fact that Puck is the only character in all of Shakespeare's plays who deigns to mention the sneeze, but he weakens its disruptive force by employing the archaism "neeze." The best-known literary sneeze (or, at least, the only one that now comes to mind) occurs in Pope's Rape of the Lock, when Belinda, ravished by Sir Plume's "glittering forfex," throws snuff in the baron's nose. Immediately "with starting tears each eye o'erflows,/ And the high dome re-echoes to his nose."

Snuff artificially stimulates sneezing, which may or may not be be why Michael, Tsar of all the Russians, proposed amputating the noses of snuffers. Michael's contemporary, Pope Urban VIII, merely threatened excommunication. Some say that the practice of saying "God bless you" to sneezers originated with Pope Gregory the Great, and has to do with the superstition that the soul leaves the sneezing body, perhaps nasally.

Why is it that no one ever says "God bless you" to farters, who are as much in need of divine intervention as sneezers. Society demands that farting, though shameful (and belching, though comic), should be controlled; sneezing is, except for the most determined among us, uncontrollable.  

Reposted: Antimylarmonofilamentarianism

In 1895, my wise and courageous grandparents left the abysmal, backward Ukraine and struck out for the new world. Nine years later, my father was born in a cold-water flat in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The date of his birth: December 22, 1904, exactly at the winter solstice. "And they called his name, Emanuel, God with us." If he had been born in the old country, before the Russian authorities imposed legal cognomina upon us, he would have been named Emanuel ben Isaiah -- his father's name appended to his own as a patronymic.

Despite his traditional moniker and his commitment to the essence of Judaism, my father was fiercely hostile to the irrationalities of religion. His view -- and my grandfather Isaiah's even more strongly -- was that for a thousand years our lineage had been kept in poverty and darkness not just by the czars and the Cossacks but also by the rabbis. In politics my father and grandfather began as socialists and became New Dealers; in philosophy, they rejected theological doctrine and were among the children of the Enlightenment whom Moses Mendelssohn had led to the promised land of evidence and reason. I doubt that any of my ancestors knew Karl Marx's sentence that "the criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism," but they spoke and acted as though such wisdom had been absorbed from the cradle. My brothers and I were taught to resist the exclusivity, superstition, and ceremony and especially the triumphalism of religion.   

We now have a religious controversy in our peaceful, progressive, and largely secular western town. A group of orthodox Jews have petitioned the city council for permission to construct an eruv. What is an eruv? It’s a “symbolic boundary that allows orthodox Jews to carry things, including their own children, outside their home during the Sabbath." (Carrying is considered work, and orthodoxy's strict interpretation of religious law prohibits sabbatical labor.) A latter-day eruv is constructed out of fishing line that is strung on utility poles; curiously, it may incorporate functioning electric and telephone wires. If you're within the lines, you're "in" your home.

I know that my forbears detested eruvim and similar expressions of irrational piety. I myself am not enraged by these useless but harmless superstitions. Constructing an eruv does not endanger our species; it's not like opposing contraception or prohibiting stem-cell research. An eruv consoles the believers and doesn't much bother the rest of us. Yet if there is a spirit in the sky, which I very much doubt, I would hope that he would not be so small-minded as to issue ukases about carrying infants on Saturdays; infants should be carried as much as they want, which is just about everywhere and always. And if the god of Abraham and Isaac has become so narrow as to promulgate an inside/outside-the-home rule, I would also hope that he would be intelligent enough not to be flummoxed by such transparent trickery as hanging mylar filament on poles.   

I have no intuitive conception of god, but I think that the orthodox trivialize our human and shared longing for transcendence when they sanctify such petty practices. It would be far more pious for the orthodox to take every nickel spent to appease the Ancient of Days and bestow it on a poor Jewish family from Tashkent. If the eruvim-makers can't locate eligible Jews, there are Hondurans and Sudanese a-plenty who deserve their attention. When the believers re-direct their enthusiasm and their resources toward truly charitable enterprises, they will honor the universal immigrant experience and they will also practice the very worthy Jewish virtue of compassion. The effort spent to construct an eruv is a foolish waste of time.

Here's my father's view:  "It took us hundreds of years to fight our way out of the ghetto and they want to put themselves back in jail. If the rabbis had their way," he would say, "Mahler and Bernstein and Gershwin would play accordion in a klezmer band in Bialystok, Einstein would balance the books for a caftan maker in Kiev, and a hundred and fifty Jewish Nobel Prize winners would squander their intelligence davening in a dismal Vilna synagogue."

I think it’s in a Wallace Markfield novel that an old Jewish guy confronts a group of twenty-something Jewish hippies/slackers in Miami Beach. After a heated discussion, he admonishes them:  "And don't ever be ashamed that you’re Jewish. It’s enough that I’m ashamed that you’re Jewish."

Which is pretty much how I feel about the eruvistas.  Well, not exactly ashamed.  Embarrassed, perhaps, by their superstitious infatuation with the "dark backward and abysm of time." 

Advice for Writers

One of this blague's more inquisitive readers is a talented young journalist who knows that before Vivian de St. Vrain morphed into Dr. Metablog, he had spent a lifetime either bent unproductively over the ball point or wearily pounding on the word-processor. The young reader has asked this question:  what have decades of practice taught you, Dr. M., about the craft of writing?  And in response, Dr. M. has peered soulwise and discovered -- not a heck of a lot.

Yet in all fairness, the curious reader's question is flattering and deserves a response. And therefore Dr. M. has pondered and pondered and has now refined the drossy deposits that clog his brainal synapses into as much wisdom as he feels qualified to dispense. (Let us be clear -- the advice that follows is not meant to be argumentative or prescriptive or know-it-all. Different writers do things in different ways. The precepts that are offered here may not apply to all writing; they describe only the Way of the Metablog.) 

Let us assume that the seeker of advice brings to the table intelligence and information and a point of view -- but needs a little coaching on tactics. Point one:            

Just as I respect the first tenet of real estate -- location, location, location -- so I subscribe to the most important (but often neglected) rule of writing, which is

A)  plot, plot, plot, plot, plot. The writer must tell a story. People relish stories, respond to narrative, and are most engaged when they pursue a plot's twists and turns. Just because it's non-fiction, doesn't mean that the story-teller's bag of tricks cannot be accessed. Fortunately, every piece of prose from the briefest anecdote to the most convoluted intellectual argument can and should be structured as a narrative. In non-fiction, the first rule of plotting is to "establish the enigma." The enigma need not be a formal question, but it's indisputable that every essay answers either an explicit or an unspoken question. Is not every writer free to shape that implicit inquiry to his own purposes? And in the process of delivering an answer, is he not also free to sprinkle clues (some of them red herrings) along the path? And also at liberty to let his readers dangle until the moment comes to gratify their curiosity--and while they dangle, to let them endure suspense; suspense that can be intensified by teasing the reader about what's going to happen next? And every once in a while, to spring a surprise by veering off on an unanticipated or even misleading tangent? Nor is there anything wrong with the judicious flashback, the flash forward, or the deceptive digression -- tricks of the trade that have won the laurel since the bronze age, centuries before the time when "establish the enigma" became the watchword. Remember: "all writing is fiction, especially non-fiction." 

Connoisseurs of storytelling know that the most indispensable element in any narrative is climax. Because climax is so essential, it must be exploited to the full, not just on the universal level but also on the particular, and therefore      

B)  every sentence should achieve climax. As a general rule, the climax should come in the sentence's last phrase, or better still, in its final climactic word. The crucial, contributing part of every sentence, the idea which it strives to convey, the very target of its forward motion, should, whenever artistically feasible, come dead last. When this precept is honored, each sentence becomes an arrow aimed at its own natural target. And it follows as night the day, that every paragraph should also come to climax--and that the climax of the paragraph should be its own last sentence. So designed, sentences and paragraphs carry within them both the exciting pressure of forward motion and also coherence of argument. There's an ancillary benefit: when a sentence terminates in a climax, transitions become less awkward, because the intellectual content (or logic) of sentence B begins just where sentence A left off, and the logic of sentence C starts where B concludes. Sentences and logic coalesce and become as one. This maxim, true for sentences, is even more true for paragraphs. And therefore it follows that a practiced writer, making deft use of climax, can easily 

C)  avoid ungainly mechanical transitions, such as "nevertheless," "moreover, "on the other hand," and even that offensive bit of pop neojargonianism, "having said that" -- for these fillers are words that constrict the thoroughfare of thought. Of course there will be times when such connectives usefully signal a switch in direction, but for the most part, transitions between sentences and paragraphs should not be mechanical, i.e. by the use of conjunctive phrases and adverbs, but logical. Logical transitions need not rely on distracting howevers, however easy and tempting it might be to employ them. The best transitions are transparent or, even better, invisible. If a writer studies his sentences and is compelled to admit that they are only linked by banausic connectives, then he must judge whether the argument he offers is truly coherent or whether its logical weaknesses have been plastered over with rhetorical flimflammery. Any writer who wants his prose to be persuasive will profit by examining his connectives. And while the writer is engaged in such scrutiny, he should also check to see that he has

D)  transferred important concepts from nouns and adjectives into verbs. And by verbs, I mean verbs of vigor--not copulatives, passives, or colorless neutral words like seem, appear, make, or do. I mean verbs with punch, or better still, verbs that punch. In revising a sentence, it's a good idea to determine whether it's the nouns and their modifiers that bear the brunt of the argument. If they are doing more than their fair share of the labor, then it is mandatory to reconfigure the sentence so that the verbs strain and lift and carry. A paragraph rich in colorful verbs is active and infectious and engaging; a paragraph loaded with nouns and modifiers can be clotted and static. Strong verbs keep things moving. They keep the plot in gear. They add grit and heft. And so does the related process whereby

E)  generalizations and abstractions are replaced by instances and examples. Let me provide an example. A friend, a large man who has always savored his sauce Bearnaise, wrote this sentence to me: "My doctor--an Asian woman who weighs about fifteen pounds--has been hectoring me about my reluctance to subsist on twigs and grasses." What an excellent sentence -- not just because of the colorful verbs ("hector," "subsist"), the ironic faux-hyperbole ("about fifteen pounds") or the fact that the sentence rises to a splendid climax, but because of the specificity of "twigs and grasses." A lesser writer might have, instead of "subsist on twigs and grasses," employed a bland formula such as "go on a diet" or "become a vegetarian." But by using the concrete "twigs and grasses" for the abstract "diet" or "vegetarian," my correspondent has not only caught our attention and amused us, but he has created a metaphor. "Twigs and grasses" is specific and visual and memorable. While these nouns stand for "diet" and "vegetarian," they also stand for whatever penumbra of meaning my friend's readers bring to the interpretation of these words. In my own case, it's a irresistible vision of a big guy metamorphosed into a large twitchy-nostrilled rabbit nibbling the bark of willows. Such is the paradox of the metaphor: the more specific the word, the more spacious the liberty of interpretation. Poets know this instinctively; that's why they're poets. But remember, writers: metaphor is only one of a bucketload of figures of speech. The astute writer does not limit himself to metaphor alone, but remembers to    

F)  use figures of speech of all kinds: pun, simile, alliteration, oxymoron, parataxis, hyperbole, understatement or litotes, irony, metonymy (where an individual stands for a class), synecdoche (where a part signifies the whole), aposiopesis -- I could go on and on!  It's the figure of speech that keeps things lively, that makes prose sparkle and that make readers, already enthralled with plot and dazzled by recurrent exciting climaxes, fully engage with the written word.  After all, writing has no value unless it attracts and holds the reader. And so it follows that a writer must, finally, 

G)  know and respect his readership. He must provide all the information that a reader needs to follow the argument. Yet at the same time, he must resist the temptation to be over-explicit. Let readers do some of the work. Let them complete the connections that the writer only suggests. It will keep them on their toes, make them feel intelligent, and retain their interest. And while they're so engaged, the writer might remind himself of another precept, which is to try to

H)  make syntax and logic work together. Get them on the same track. Put the main idea in the main clause, put subordinate ideas in subordinate clauses. Put the parenthetical idea in a parenthetical clause. Put parallel ideas in parallel clauses, but when ideas are not parallel, emphasize their incompatibility by using contrasting syntactic structure. Syntax is a tool. Sentences in which logic is chugging onward and syntax is all over the map can be confusing and even impenetrable. Alexander Pope said about poetry, "The sound should be an echo to the sense."  In prose, the syntax should be an echo to the sense; or rather, the sense should be an echo to the syntax; or even better, the syntax and the sense should take each other's hand and dance the same dance. And finally (and this time the "finally" is not meant to be misleading),

I)  scrutinize every word and see if it is necessary or whether it can either be omitted or made more precise. When in doubt, throw it out. Or amend it. It should be a maxim that in good writing, no one ever "walks down the street." And by "walks down the street," I certainly do not mean "walk down the street." "Walks down the street" is a metaphor for a colorless expression. Why should someone walk down the street, when he can totter, or saunter, or sashay, or hurtle, or trot, or swagger, or stagger, or promenade down an avenue, boulevard, lane, causeway, footpath, or promenade?  English overflows with words that are specific, evocative, and suggestive. Let's have fewer street-walkers and more sidewalk-promenaders. Keats said the the poet should "load every rift with ore," and so should the writer of non-fiction. But be careful not to overload; don't allow prose to slide toward the baroque. And at last

J)   feel perfectly free to ignore the canard that you were taught in grade school  --that every piece of writing needs a conclusion.  It doesn't.  As a general rule, avoid formal conclusions.

Upper West Side Then and Now

From 1965 to 1969 we lived on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Now we've returned for a month-long visit. In days of yore, we were the busy young parents pushing our baby carriage down Broadway. Now forty years more 'mature, we step aside as nannies maneuver the twins (without question there are both more nannies and more twins) around and past us.

And the eternal West Side -- has it also matured? Certainly it's a more prosperous neighborhood and a more crowded one. With scores of giant high-rise apartment houses added in the intervening years, it's become even more densely populated. Paradoxically, it's also safer. In the 1960s, received wisdom stated that to wander onto 85th Street or onto Columbus Avenue after dark was to risk death or at least a good mugging. Now the area is peaceful morning, noon and night, and newly-fashionable Columbus Avenue houses dozens of trendy ethnic restaurants. Forty years ago, it was foolish to venture across Central Park to the aristocratic East Side, where, it was rumored, there lived people who were fair-skinned and blond. Some areas of the Park, like The Ramble, were famously dangerous and were visited only by those who were itching for action. Now, single women jog without the least concern. We took advantage of the new freedom by taking frequent jaunts to the row of fabulous museums along Fifth Avenue. (In the 1960s, museums were difficult for West Siders to access but admission was free; today, they're easy to reach but the ticket prices are staggering.) In the good old days, West Side street-corners were gathering points for enterprising drug-dealers. On this visit, I didn't spot a single dealer or a single transaction. Moreover, the neighborhood used to be thick with policemen on patrol; this time, police are scarce and apparently unnecessary. Why the improvement in public safety? In a word, money. Only the rich can now afford to live on the Upper West Side, and rich people don't need to knock you down and empty your wallet. They have other fish to fry. 

There's a new feature of transportation: droves of briefcase-bearing suit-wearers are shuttled Wallstreetway in luxurious "private cars." Meanwhile, the subway is as efficient and as filthy as ever, but nowadays we pay not with tokens but with "metro cards." The New York Times, then 10 cents, is now $1.25; it has fewer columns, a larger font, and poorer writing. More changes: in yesteryear, a man shouting in public was very likely a paranoid schizophrenic; now a noisy talker has a gimmick in his ear and a cell phone and he's doing nothing more lunatic than snapping up undercapitalized mortgages. 

Dogs, here as elsewhere, are horribly indulged. One day we peeked into a "pet exercise" gymnasium and later were amused by a well-appointed van labeled "Pet Limousine." Although there are many more curs, there are fewer piles of canine poopery on the sidewalks; most dog-walkers make use of plastic bags. Thank you, dog-walkers.

Affordable supermarkets have disappeared and there are only specialty food shops where the prices are beyond astronomical. But where do the waitresses, cooks, cleaning ladies, nannies, cashiers, shop girls, bank tellers, kioskers, subway maintenance men, bus drivers, janitors, and policemen shop?  Where, in fact, do they live? Not in the neighborhood; not since the entire West Side went condo.

It's still a polyglot world, but there's much less Spanish and a lot more Russian, Chinese, Hindi and Arabic.

More novelties: there's a Duane Reade (sometimes two) on every street and there's a second crowded Starbucks visible from the Starbucks where you sit poring over your wireless laptop and nursing your gigantico skinny dry vanilla latte. In the 1960s, there were seven movie theaters within walking distance -- including the New Yorker and the Thalia, the mother churches of cinema worship. Now, there are none -- nor even a single dvd rental store. It's all Netflix and downloads.

There's been a phenomenal growth of personal services: not just the barbershops and hairdressers of old, but also whole galaxies of nail care shops. Who could have imagined that in the new millennium, fingernails would become the cornerstone of the economy? An economy of which I'm not a part; my nail care consists of occasionally biting off a sliver of stray keratin and taking a cosmetic nibble or two at the paronychium. I don't believe I've spent a nickel, lifetime, on my nails, nor do I intend to do so. Nope, no manicures, nor pedicures, nor medicures (what the heck is a medicure?) nor massages nor aromatherapy for me. Nor will I have my ears candled (a process that one medical website calls 'useless and dangerous") or my eyebrows threaded or any part of my body, public or private, waxed. It appears that every facial feature and every organ has an entire industry dedicated to its hygiene and its remediation. Is the upper West Side experiencing an outbreak of good health? Or a triumph of narcissism?

One final observation: since we lived here, many expensively-architected fancy-shmancy private schools have appeared. Meanwhile, public schools have been allowed to slide further into poverty. Ugly, concrete block buildings surrounded by chainlink fence and razor wire -- not temples of learning, but prisons.The gap between rich and poor, evident then, has become a chasm. Manhattan is safer and more livable than it was (at least for the prosperous), but it will not be truly healed until its citizenry moves beyond "private wealth and public squalor."

Jane Austen Nude

Today's posting is contributed by the art historian, Alan Saxe-Popette. 

Jane Austen's quiet private life has been thoroughly explored for events of emotional import. It is therefore a wonder that there has been such inattention to the portrait, identified some forty years ago,in which the novelist, nude, reclines on a green baize fainting couch. One would have supposed that writers of fiction and especially film directors would have seized on the opportunities that the portrait presents, especially since the only other surviving representation of Jane Austen is her sister Cassandra's amateurish, unflattering, and essentially asexual sketch. The Austen nude has faded inexplicably from view. Older readers of this blague will surely remember the mid-1960s flurry of journalistic interest, some of it nasty and anti-feminist -- a cover story in Time ("Did Jane Disrobe") as well as the scandalmongering reportage of Huntley and Brinkley.  But just like the revelations concerning Wordsworth's French mistress and like the notoriety that greeted Edith Wharton's pornographic short story Beatrice Palmato, the brouhaha over the Austen nude quickly evaporated.

The portrait itself, a full-length study in chalk and colored pencils, resides in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and his Circle, which is housed in Room 319 of the New York Public Library, and  may be viewed upon request. Perhaps it is unfortunate that the first account of the Austen nude appeared in the pages of the Keats-Shelley Journal, a publication sponsored by the Pforzheimer.  More scholarly attention might have been paid if the identification of the portrait had been announced in a journal of larger circulation, such as Nineteenth-Century Fiction or Romantic Studies.

The late R. W. Chapman, who knew more about Jane Austen than any scholar of his generation, resisted the idea that the portrait was genuine. His attack on its authenticity, published as an appendix to the revised edition of the Complete Works of Jane Austen, is scathing, but is rather a reflection of Chapman's Victorian prejudices than of the facts. Chapman was a traditionalist who believed that young females, even brilliant female novelists, should be, above all, decorous. His Jane Austen was a bulwark of conservative and hierarchical values and he would certainly not have recognized the modern revisionist conception that situates the novelist in an uneasy alliance with transgression and subversion. In private, moreover, Chapman was notoriously prudish. He is reported to have confessed to his great friend Kathleen Tillotson (herself a well-known scholar of English fiction) that "I just don't want to go to my grave thinking that I've looked upon dear Miss Austen's pubic hair."

In the 1960s, there was considerable resistance to the authenticity of the portrait, perhaps because, compared to Cassandra's prim drawing, the new rendering revealed a young woman in full beauty and bloom. Jane retains the familiar apple cheeks and the dark hair, but her eyes are knowing and forthright rather than subdued, and her long, glossy and loose black locks, secured only by a single cherry-colored ribbon, appear as they were described by Jane Austen's grand-niece, who recalled her aunt having "large dark eyes and a brilliant complexion, and long long black hair down to her knees." Opinions will of course vary, but many will find that in this portrait, Jane looks somewhat Italian or Gypsy or perhaps even Levantine. Her expression is eager, her waist slim, her legs short but shapely, and her breasts, despite their surprisingly large aureoles, magnificent.   

Misgivings about the portrait's authenticity survived even until the 1970s. But then it was established that the chamber in which Austen posed was the drawing room at Steventon that she shared with Cassandra. There's a useful description in Constance Hill's Jane Austen, Her Homes and Friends (1902). Hill, it is well known, had access to the Lefroy family papers. The Lefroys were important connections of the Austens. It was James Lefroy who wooed Jane and then inexplicably broke off his relationship with her and retired to Ireland. Jane's brother James Austen's daughter married a Lefroy; Jane's grand-niece Anna Lefroy, the child of this union, left a remembrance of her great-aunt's sitting room. "I remember," wrote Anna, "the common looking carpet with its chocolate ground that covered the floor, and some portions of furniture. A pointed press, with shelves above for books, that stood with its back on the wall next the Bedroom, & opposite the fireplace; my Aunt Jane's Pianoforte -- & above all, on a table between the windows, above which hung a looking glass, 2 tonbridge-ware work boxes of oval shape, fitted up with ivory barrels containing reels for silk, yard measures, etc." In the portrait, these two same oval Tunbridge work-boxes appear just to the left and behind Jane Austen's head; the keyboard of "Aunt Jane's Pianoforte" is in part visible to the right; the oval cheval-glass is exactly as Anna described it. Moreover, the ingenious young art historian Oksana Sartry, who, using powerful magnifiers, was able to identify the books in the press, discovered not only Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison and Robert Bage's Hermsprong, both novels known to have been much studied by Austen, but also a folio with the words "Volume the Second" inscribed on its spine. "Volume the Second" was the name that the novelist gave her manuscript collection of early works (which included the unfinished novel, The Watsons). With this confirmatory evidence, skepticism was at last dispelled. Austen's remark to her sister Cassandra (reporting on a day spent with James Lefroy), "imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking" took on new meaning.  And what did Jane mean when she wrote to her sister, "here I am once more in this Scene of Dissipation & vice, and I begin already to find my Morals corrupted."

What was the exact occasion for the portrait and why was it found among the Lefroy papers? There are two views. The first is that Jane sent it to James Lefroy as part of the courtship process: "here's what you get if you marry me." This explanation is certainly possible, but the greater likelihood is that it was a "revenge" portrait: "here's what you have scorned."

That the drawing has sexual content is undeniable, but it is absurd to think, as some have suggested, that Jane Austen would allow herself to be depicted in a post-orgasmic state. It is true that Jane's skin is rosy and flushed and that her plump nipples are erect, but the placement of her hand just above the tendrils of abundant black hair is traditional and would not seem to indicate that she had pleasured herself. Those who argue that Jane had recently masturbated seem, frankly, to have surrendered to prurience. I myself, after the very closest scrutiny, can discover no evidence whatsoever of what one writer has called "a clitoral cleft in arousal." Jane Austen was bold, but she would never, ever, have exceeded the bounds of modesty.

Why I Hate Machines

So I've been trying, by god, to figure out why the riding mower has been cutting on an angle, the right side leaving the grass higher than the left, and I've been crawling under the machine looking at the cutting deck from all angles and not able to understand the mechanism except it's obvious that it's not parallel to the ground, and my neighbor Ed was by and he's kind of a genius with machinery which I most definitely am not, and I said to him, Ed would you take look and see why the mower is cutting at an angle and he said, Well, here's one problem your left rear tire is flat which made me feel really dumb because I was so busy trying to understand the suspension system on the deck that I never even looked at the tire and I said, Flat, how can it be flat, I never run it anywhere but over the grass and he said, Well, look right there it's got a thorn in it, A thorn, I said, how can a thorn penetrate a Carlyle Super Tuff tire, and he said, Oh yeah they do that, but I can fix it, I'm busy today but I'll do it tomorrow I have a system you just push through what looks like knitting needle with sticky stuff on the end and pull it out, it will seal it right up, it's a tubeless tire isn't it? and I said Yes it is, and if you could fix it tomorrow that would be great, well next day he took the tire and tried it his way but he couldn't get it to hold air so he says Take it down to PTOs and they'll patch it from the inside, so I put it in the trunk of the car and drove to town and they fixed it and then I put it back on the axle, it has three small washers and one large washer and one of those spring nuts and I started the engine but by god the mower wouldn't move and I thought what the heck is going on here, I put everything back exactly as it came off and it was running just fine when I took it off so what could I possibly be doing wrong, I took the wheel off and put it on again and I still couldn't figure it out so I got in the car and drove over to Ed's, he was cutting wood but he stopped and I said, Ed, what's wrong with that lamb, why do you have him penned up all by himself and he said, you know how the lambs are always butting heads and pushing each other around, well I went out in the field and he was down, couldn't move a bit, so I took him home and I don't know whether his brains are addled or he's really hurt, I thought we'd better have him slaughtered but you can see he's doing better, getting up and eating so we'll hold off a day, and I said maybe he has a bad back like me, and he said, No, he's too young for a bad back, so I said, Well, maybe he has vertigo like you, which is not all that funny because Ed lost a week to vertigo last June, and he kind of laughed and said, Well, is your mower working now, and I said, Not exactly, the engine's fine and the belt turns but it's not moving frontwards or backwards and he said, How can that be, I'll come over and take a look so later that day he came by and sure enough it wouldn't move, so we took off the wheel again and studied it but I certainly couldn't figure it out and he couldn't either, everything looked good and perfect, we puzzled over it for a while and then he called the John Deere dealer in North Haverhill and the technician said maybe you lost the key when you took off the wheel and Ed said, O yes of course, we must have lost the key, I didn't think of that, and I said What the heck is the key and he said Well, in a lot of these machines the axle is broached which means there's a slot in it and a slot in the wheel and you have to have a key which is just a small piece of metal otherwise the axle will spin but the wheel won't rotate, so we looked all around for the lost key but couldn't find it and then Ed said, Look at your tire they didn't even mount it right, it's out of round, you'd better bring it back in and while you're there check if the key is in the shop somewhere, it might have stuck in the wheel because of the grease, so I took the wheel and put it in the trunk and drove back to PTOs and showed him that the tire was out of round, the owner was embarrassed about the bad job he had done and wouldn't even look me in the eye but he re-mounted the tire and when he finished I said, By the way, you didn't happen to find the key I lost it, and he said I'll look inside but he couldn't find it, so he said I'll make you another one which was nice of him though the key is only at most a 50 cent piece but it saved me from having to go to Napa Auto Parts or drive 30 minutes to North Haverhill to the John Deere dealer, so he made the part it took him only a couple of minutes, he had the stock he just had to cut and file a two inch piece, I brought it home and I put the key in the slot and put the wheel on, I had to use a board for a lever to get the rear of the mower up in the air and it was tricky because I held the board with my right hand and the wheel in the left but I managed alright and then I got on the tractor and started the engine and everything worked perfectly except that the tractor still wouldn't go either forward or backward, I took the wheel off and put it on again, but it still wouldn't work, so I walked over to Ed's and I said, Ed, I can't for the life of me figure it out, I got the key and it fit just perfectly but the machine still doesn't move, and he said It's got to work, it makes perfect sense, I said, Hey look, your lamb looks a lot better but why did you put a hog panel across your driveway, he said It's because of the dog, he's been getting out, tomorrow he's going to be snipped and that will quiet him down a bit, which is a good idea because the dog is far too friendly even to me and I don't particularly like the dog, he's a beagle mix, not as bad as their other dog which was a rescue dog a bulldog, very ugly in my opinion, which also got out and trotted over to the pottery down the road where he was  seen running off with the Murrays' Silkie in his mouth, a Silkie is a fancy chicken, they charged Ed a hundred and sixty dollars for vet bills and mental anguish, the chicken died anyway, so Ed got out his rifle and shot the bulldog and then dug a hole four feet deep, he said that all the way down it was nothing but powder, it's been that dry the last few weeks, anyway Ed came by again and we tried the machine and it wouldn't go forward or backward and I was about to surrender and load up the damn thing and take it back to the dealer when we lifted both back wheels off the ground and suddenly the axle which hadn't been turning even though the belt had been turning started to spin, it must have been something about the gears that didn't mesh properly anyway we put the wheel back on again and I started it up and by god it ran as good as ever but I had wasted a whole day fussing with the mower just because it had picked up a goddamn thorn probably blackberry which is in brief why I hate machines

Seventy-two Virgins

It appears to be the case that martyrs of a certain persuasion will be rewarded in the afterlife with the ministrations of seventy-two virgins. It would take a theologian of extraordinary skill to explain why acts of violence should be rewarded with sexual indulgence. I raise a far less knotty question: if the aim is bliss, then why virgins?  Why not women of experience and expertise? Benjamin Franklin, the most practical of our Founding Fathers, was dogmatic on this nice point: shun the callow in favor of women who've been around the block, because "every Knack... by Practice [is] capable of improvement."  I think that B-Frank would agree that there is something about the virgins-for-martyrs deal that's kind of, how shall I say, impractical or counter-intuitive or even, dare I say, kinky.   

Here's a second theological conundrum. What is the reward when the martyr is herself female? I must presume that she will be blessed with seventy-two male virgins -- if not, there's a very serious afterlife asymmetry. Not to reward females who give themselves to the cause would be a statement that the culture of religious martyrdom does not support sexual equality, which I can hardly bring myself to believe. But in the case of female martyrs, the matter of sexual expertise is further exacerbated. Specifically, of what conceivable value are seventy-two knackless male virgins? If we postulate that each male virgin is good for between ten and fifteen seconds of actual intercourse, it follows that they will be consumed at the rate of four to six every minute, which means that on average a martyress, however patient, would enjoy a sum of only twelve or so minutes of pleasure (setting aside time for re-mounting and repositioning), which is surely insufficient exercise to produce a meaningful let alone heavenly experience.   

Nor will it be all that great for the male virgin at the end of the queue who has to settle for sloppy seventy-seconds.   

Frost

When I lived in Cambridge in the first years of the 1960s, it was not unusual to encounter, on a warm winter afternoon, the poet Robert Frost walking slowly along Massachusetts Avenue. I'd watch him as he strolled over to Plympton Street and to the Grolier -- which was then as now, I imagine, the only all-poetry bookstore in America. One day I crept behind him to the shop and sat in a secluded corner, studying him as he browsed the shelf of new arrivals. With his leathery old skin and unruly iridescent white hair, he was an iconic figure -- famous not only among friends of poetry but among readers of Life and Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post. When he "said" his poems at Sanders Theater (in late 1961 or 1962), he filled every seat and every standpoint of a large auditorium. He was an honest-to-goodness celebrity, a presence, a man who had created a body of work and had earned a reputation that no poet or cultural figure today can rival.

At JFK's inauguration in January of 1961, Frost commanded a national television audience. He started to read the poem he had composed for the occasion, but his 87-year-old eyes were blinded by the bright sunlight and he couldn't continue. There was a moment of embarrassment, and I remember cringing in sympathy with his struggle. But then he gathered himself and recited from memory, in a rejuvenated voice, "The Gift Outright." "She was our land more than a hundred years/ Before we were her people." It's an almost mystical but grandly patriotic poem about rude, unlettered colonials transforming themselves into a Nation. "Such as we were we gave ourselves outright.../ To the land vaguely realizing westward,/ But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, / Such as she was, such as she would become."

Frost died in January of 1963, just ten months before our young president was shot. It's almost impossible now to reconstruct the effervescence of the Kennedy years -- a brief exciting moment between the lukewarm bland Eisenhower administration and the interminable nightmare of Vietnam. Frost's "Dedication," the poem that he couldn't read at the inaugural, is not his best work, but its last lines catch the spirit of the time. The poet took his inspiration from the Rome of Augustus and of Horace, Virgil, and Ovid. "It is no miracle the mood is high," he wrote.  "It makes the prophet in us all presage/ The glory of the next Augustan age/ Of a power leading from its strength and pride,/ Of young ambition eager to be tried,/ Firm in our free beliefs without dismay,/ In any game the nations want to play./ A golden age of poetry and power/ Of which this noonday's the beginning hour." Frost proved to be a better poet than a prophet. Instead of a golden age of poetry and power, we've had, after the three horrible murders, a parade of fools: first the crook, then the senile puppet, then the congressional fellatio hunters, and now the smirking, dangerous dunce. 

Like the nation, I too am in steep decline. It used to be that I could memorize short poems with ease. Nowadays, it's a titanic effort of will. To forestall hardening of the mind, and in a desperate effort to keep my brain supple, I decided to memorize Frost's "Birches." It's when you learn a poem by heart that you truly appreciate it, and so I can now say with absolute confidence and authority that "Birches" is a poem not just for the age, but for all time. In point of fact, I've been bothering myself about how Frost will fare in civilizations as far into the future as Virgil and Horace are in our past. Will students of poetry be able to grasp the subtlety of "Birches?" The story, the plot itself, will pose no problem. Frost knows that birches are bent to the ground by ice-storms, but he would fancifully "prefer to have some boy bend them/ As he went out and in to fetch the cows." For the "boy," tree-climbing is a high art: "He always kept his poise/ To the top branches, climbing carefully/ With the same pains you use to fill a cup/ Up to the brim, and even above the brim." Frost then shifts perspective, and the fantasy that birches are bent not by ice-storms but by athletic youngsters transforms into a memory, a truth: "So was I once myself a swinger of birches;/ And so I dream of going back to be." He closes the poem with a vision in which he leaves the real world and starts life anew: "I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,/ And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk/ Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,/ But dipped its top and set me down again." Even though our descendants will read the poem in an extinct language and in an edition encrusted with explanatory footnotes, I'm sure that they'll understand its outline. (I imagine too that some future scholar will make his career by explicating the line "A boy too far from town to learn baseball.") But will anyone in 4006 A.D. be sufficiently conversant with everyday twentieth-century American English to recognize the skill with which Frost masks his deep insights into the relationship between the material and the eternal with art-that-hides-art colloquialisms? Or appreciate to the full the sly understatement of "one could do worse than be a swinger of birches?" The beauty and the profundity of "Birches" tease us who share Frost's language. What a challenge the poem will be eighty generations down the road! Moreover, Is there even the remotest possibility that our successors will be equipped to grasp how much of Roman poetry (Ovid especially) Frost distills into "I'd like to get away from earth awhile/ And then come back to it and begin over./ May no fate willfully misunderstand me/ And half grant what I wish and snatch me away/ Not to return." Frost possessed the genius to keep us in touch with our past and to connect us to our future.

I wish that I had talked to Robert Frost that winter day when he was trudging on. "How are you, Mr. Frost," I might have asked. Perhaps he would have smiled or said "Nice day."

That would have been a good thing to recall.   

The P. S. 217 "Assembly"

During the 1940s and early 1950s, when I was a pupil at P. S. 217, the school auditorium was given over to formal weekly "assemblies." Boys were required to wear white shirts and green ties (girls had a specified outfit as well, but in those days I was so unconscious of a) girls and b) their costumes that I'm darned if I can remember what was worn by the young ladies). Before entering the auditorium, classes lined up in "size places." P. S. 217 was particularly strong on "size places" -- a point of particular humiliation for me, because I was, as WS says about R of G, "so long a-growing, and so leisurely" that I was by far the smallest child in every class from first grade to eighth. After we found our assigned seats (boys in one row, girls in the next), our principal Miss Bildersee, a formidable and incredibly ancient woman with nostrils so huge and distended that an agile boy could go spelunking in them, would perform the mandatory reading from the Bible. Blessings on her fond old heart, Miss Bildersee regularly choose melodious passages from the book of Psalms. I was particularly struck by the eloquence of "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful," with its abrupt counterbalancing antistrophe: "the ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away." After the Bible reading and some announcements, there was usually a performance of some sort. Choral readings, the oddest of art forms, were far too frequent. I remember that I was once a member of a sextet of quavering sopranos who memorized and recited the patriotic World War I poem "In Flanders Fields." What in the world was a second-grader supposed to make of "We are the Dead. Short days ago/ We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,/Loved and were loved, and now we lie/In Flanders fields./Take up our quarrel with the foe:/To you from failing hands we throw/The torch; be yours to hold it high./If ye break faith with us who die/ We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/ In Flanders fields." (Such poppycock was received as true literary greatness. It would have been beyond utopian imagination that our teachers would have known or introduced us to the distinguished WWI poetry of Wilfred Owen or Isaac Rosenberg or Siegfried Sassoon or Edward Thomas.) Then our music specialist Mrs. Georgia Keiselbach would sit down at the piano and teach us songs, some of them also left over from the first World War:  "Keep the home-fires burning,/ While your hearts are yearning,/ Though your lads are far away/ They dream of home;/ There's a silver lining/Through the dark cloud shining,/Turn the dark cloud inside out,/Till the boys come home." And also: "Give me some men who are stout-hearted men/ Who will fight for the right they adore... Shoulder to shoulder, and bolder and bolder."  And: "Tramp, tramp, tramp along the highway/Tramp, tramp, tramp, the road is free...  We're planters and Canucks/ Virginians and Kentucks/Captain Dick's own Infantry/ Captain Dick's own Infantry," which I now know to have come from Victor Herbert's Naughty Marietta (1910) and which provoked a great deal of surreptitious tittering because it had the word "dick" in it. In those unenlightened days we sang very many overtly religious songs: "White Christmas" and "Silent Night" and "Easter Parade." I much admired the tune of "The First Noel" but I had no idea what was meant by "born is the king of Israel" -- the only Israel I knew of was a recently-founded democracy. I loved the Thanksgiving hymn "We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing;/ He chastens and hastens His will to make known;/ The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing,/ Sing praises to His name; He forgets not his own" and many more stanzas, none of which I could parse or understand (still can't, in fact!). Another Thanksgiving song: "Over the river and through the woods/ To grandmother's house we go/The horse knows the way/To carry the sleigh...," which I found to be curiously disorienting because my particular grandmother lived in a tiny third-floor walkup on noisy and sweaty Coney Island Avenue. We sang the immensely mysterious Lord's Prayer (in the Schubert setting, I later discovered). Why did we so?  Were the heathens and Jews among us expected to convert on the spot? I much preferred the patriotic songs, although even they too were permeated with inexplicable theology. We were fervent jingos.   Not one, but two full stanzas of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic": "In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,/With a glory in His bosom, that transfigures you and me/ As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,/ For God is marching on." And two stanzas also of "The Star-Spangled Banner": "Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand/ Between their loved home and the war's desolation!/ Blessed with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land/ Praise the Power that hath made and preserv'd us a nation./Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,/ And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'" I preferred the rousing "O Columbia! the gem of the ocean,/ The home of the brave and the free,/ The shrine of each patriot's devotion,/ A world offers homage to thee" and "God Bless America" as well as the jingoist exceptionalism and cluttered syntax of "Our father's God, to thee/ Author of liberty/ To thee we sing./  Long may our land be bright/ With freedom's holy light;/ Protect us by thy might/ Great God our King." 

Here's a song we were distinctly not taught and did not sing: "This land is your land, this land is my land/ From California, to the New York Island./ From the redwood forest, to the Gulf Stream waters/ This land was made for you and me." We especially did not sing: "In the squares of the city  -- in the shadow of the steeple/  Near the relief office -- I see my people/ And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin' /If this land's still made for you and me."

December 17.  I now remember that we sang musical settings to two familiar poems. The first, Emma Lazarus's inscription on the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore." Hey, that's my grandparents you're calling "wretched refuse." The second, Joyce Kilmer's horrid "Trees": "I think that I shall never see/  A poem lovely as a tree...  A tree who's hungry mouth is pressed/ Against the earth's sweet-flowing breast" etc.  This song was only palatable because it allowed us to say the word "breast" out loud. 

(Thanks to Steve and to Barry, graduates of P. S. 217, for jogging my memory;  thanks also to David [P. S. 102].

Graduates of P. S. 217 who happen to stumble onto this site: feel free to add comments or to forward this post to classmates with whom you might be in touch.)

Prayer Science

According to The New York Times (3/31/2006), the world of prayer science is all in a dither. A new study has apparently demonstrated that "prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery." The study was a big, expensive deal: ten years of work at a cost of $2.4 million (contributed by the ever-zealous Templeton Foundation, a powerful supporter of prayer research). The details are utterly and weirdly fascinating. "Researchers monitored 1802 patients at six hospitals who received coronary bypass surgery. The patients were broken into three groups. Two were prayed for; the third was not. Half of the patients who received the prayers were told that they were being prayed for; half were told that they might or might not receive prayers. The researchers asked the members of three congregations -- St. Paul's Monastery in St. Paul; the Community of Teresian Carmelites in Worcester, Mass.; and Silent Unity, a Missouri prayer ministry near Kansas City -- to deliver the prayers, using the patients' first names and the first initials of their last names. The congregations were told that they could pray in their own way, but they were instructed to include the phrase "for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications.'" The shocking result: "researchers found no difference between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not." Prayer, it would appear (or intercessory prayer as this variety is called), does not change things. 

I admire the dedicated men and women of science who put heart and soul into this project, but with all due respect, I must question both their conclusions and their protocols. For starters, the inference that prayer doesn't work is far too broad. Inasmuch as the scientists engaged only Christians to pray, all that they proved was that Christian prayer doesn't work. It's marvelously ethnocentric to suggest that just because Christians tanked, other religions could not succeed. It was Bailey Smith, the President of the Southern Baptist Convention, who authoritatively proclaimed that "God does not hear the prayer of a Jew." And yet, in a stunning theological upset, the scientific evidence now proves that God Almighty does not hear the prayers of Christians. But such a conclusion is itself far too hyperbolic. In actual fact, all that the study established is that God did not hear the prayers of three particular groups of prayer-providers. It's certainly a black mark against the Teresian Carmelites and their friends, and it will be a cold day in hell before they see another Templeton prayer contract, but there's nothing to say that Southern Baptists, even Bailey Smith himself, with his private line to the Almighty, might not have had more sway with the Great Jehovah.

If the researchers had not been so blindly and thoughtlessly ethnocentric, they might have solicited the prayers of people of various faiths, especially those praying to different gods. Or even better: they might have assembled disparate groups of prayer providers. In one set, for example, there would be a Catholic, a Jehovah's Witness, and a Hindu; in another, a Muslim, a Wiccan, and a Methodist; in a third, a Scientologist, a Baptist, and a Muggletonian. Although the number of possible permutations is intimidating, the cause is noble: to determine impartially which of these groups can best cut the prayer mustard. It's wrong to put the entire burden on Christians. Scientists need to mix and match the various religions so that they can discover the most effective synergistic combination, or as it might better be called, the appropriate prayer cocktail.

In addition, the study is guilty of flagrant mishandling of dosage. There was simply no control over the amount of prayer that was administered. Just as traditional medicines come in cubic centimeters, prayer comes in units of time. Let's say that one person praying for one minute yields one prayer unit.  Pending further study, there's no way to establish exactly how many prayer units a heart patient might need. For a bypass, fifty prayer units might be a minimum dosage, but perhaps twice or three times as many units might be necessary to alleviate the symptoms of a hallucinator of witches, extraterrestrials, or other supernatural beings. It's entirely possible that the prayers in this study failed simply because they didn't meet a minimum prayer-unit threshold. Moreover, it's important not to over-prescribe. For all we know, excessive prayer might precipitate iatrogenic illnesses. And it's also a question of efficiency: once an optimum dosage can be established, prayer providers can go about their business and not waste their time generating superfluous and expensive prayer units.

Moreover, prayer scientists seem to have given no serious consideration to the group power of prayer providers. Given the present abysmal state of prayer science, it's still unknown whether prayers are more effective when delivered by just one or a very few providers, or in large choruses. Jews seem to think that a minyan, or quorum, is ten, but hard science has not confirmed this number. It's therefore imperative to experiment with different size groups in order to establish a proper medical-minyan. This is not easy, or inexpensive, but it's essential.  It would indeed be unfortunate if it turns out that a thousand prayer providers are necessary to improve the condition of just one bypass patient, but good golly, the Ancient of Days works in mysterious ways, and it's not for us to question His prayer needs.

There are some other areas in which more scientific rigor is required. A)  different diseases: just because prayer didn't work for bypasses doesn't mean it won't work for scrofula. Perhaps some diseases are more prayer-responsive than others. B) fervor: prayer science has made the naive error of assuming that all prayer providers are equal. Yet the unalterable laws of random distribution determine that some people will pray more effectively than others. In point of fact, it's entirely likely that some prayer providers will be more effective with one disease than another. If I were a patient, I'd be mighty bent out of shape (and might even seek legal recourse) if I were assigned a prayer provider who had a proven track record with ulcers but who amounted to zilch for my hip replacement.  C) identification: prayer providers were given only the first name and initial of their prayee. But "Bob S." is entirely too vague-- there might be hundreds of "Bob S"'s all over the world undergoing bypass surgery at any given time. How the blue blazes is the Lord of Hosts supposed to know which particular "Bob S" is meant?  Fortunately, there's an easy solution to this problem. Prayer providers should continue to pray for Bob S., but just remember to add the last four digits of his social security or major credit card number. 

I'm not the only person disappointed with this study. According to the Times, "Bob Barth, the spiritual director of Silent Unity, the Missouri prayer ministry, said the findings would not affect the ministry's mission. 'A person of faith would say that this study is interesting,' Mr Barth said, 'but we've been praying a long time and we've seen prayer work, we know it works, and the research on prayer and spirituality is just getting started.'"  Bob B's assertion that "prayer works" is anecdotal thinking and has absolutely no merit whatsoever, but I can't imagine a single person who wouldn't agree with him that prayer science is "just getting started"-- and also that it has a long bumpy road to travel. Fortunately, the Bush administration invested over $2 million of our tax revenues in prayer research, with more in the pipeline, so some revolutionary breakthroughs in the spiritual sciences soon might be achieved.  We'll be waiting.

What We Read in the Fifties: The Return of the Native

In Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878), Clym Yeobright and Eustacia Vye are brimming with impetuous youthful lust. They meet at a deserted spot on Egdon Heath -- a “vast tract of unenclosed wild” in southwestern England. Here’s how Hardy describes their moment of passion:   

 

          “’My Eustacia.’

          ‘Clym dearest’

          They remained long without a single utterance, for no language could reach the level of their  condition: words were as the rusty implements of a bygone barbarous epoch, and only to be occasionally tolerated.

          ‘I began to wonder why you did not come,’ said Yeobright when she had withdrawn a little from his embrace.”

 

Instead of the eager hands and tongues that a modern novelist would supply, Hardy substitutes a sentence about the inadequacies of language. Even so mild an allusion to physical pleasure was shocking to Victorian moralists, who regularly rebuked Hardy for ‘vulgarity.’ Hardy’s last and best novel, Jude the Obscure, was derided as Jude the Obscene.

 

I myself had no idea that Hardy was a breaker of sexual taboos when I first read The Return of the Native in 1955. During the fifty intervening years, I’ve read almost every one of Hardy’s many books, some of them--Jude the Obscure in particular—repeatedly and with great admiration. Why did I not revisit The Return of the Native until this past week? The silly truth is that the novel was required reading in English class, and inasmuch as I was an alienated and unhappy high school student, I made it a point of honor to dislike assigned books.

 

There’s also a second and more substantive reason:The Return of the Native was truly disorienting for provincial city kids like myself simply because so much of it turns on landscape. The novel is all about the way various characters respond to Egdon Heath, a furze-covered “somber stretch of rounds and hollows,” that is isolated, extensive, unchanging, brooding, dotted with primeval pagan barrows, and populated by sheep, shepherds and heath-croppers. To understand Hardy’s Wessex landscape,I would have had to overcome two barriers: my appalling lack of imagination and my inexperience with geography. Perhaps some of my classmates could visualize Egdon Heath. Many of them came from families that owned automobiles, and had consequently voyaged beyond city limits. They had looked upon an expanse of land larger than a baseball field and upon feathered bipeds more exotic than the flocks of pigeons that guanoed the steps of the Newkirk Avenue subway station. 

 

Had I been less put off by unfamiliar scenery and less hostile to assigned texts, I might have recognized that sparse Egdon and my crowded concrete neighborhood had much in common. Both places were backwaters untouched by modernity. Neither offered much in the way of education -– either individuals who possessed any, or schools that were genuinely dedicated to providing it. My territory, like Egdon Heath, was a place which anyone who happened to prosper, even a little, speedily abandoned -- to the port city of Budmouth in Hardy’s world, and to “the island,” that is, the new prosperous suburbs of Queens and Nassau, in mine.

 

In the 1950s, I myself had only one big idea -- that there must be a world elsewhere. Why then did I not sympathize with Eustacia Vye, whose sole and only desire is to get herself away from Egdon?  She is as out of her element treading aimlessly on the heath as I felt myself to be when I bicycled an endless series of claustrophobic streets. More to the point, why didn’t I identify with the reddleman Diggory Venn? Diggory lives alone in his spring-van and wanders the heath selling reddle (a red dye used for marking sheep). If I had been capable of reading imaginatively, I would have taken Diggory to heart. He is Romanticism’s archetypical outsider and a character whom I should or could have recognized as a fellow sufferer. I too was solitary, introspective, and on a quest for knowledge, but these traits were not understood –- as I understand them now -- as healthy questioning but instead were stigmatized as psychological disability (“Why are you moping? Why is your nose always in a book?”) An understanding of Diggory Venn might have lent dignity and historical context to my private woes.

 

Even more to the point: there I was, awash with the imperious hormones of adolescence, and yet unable to notice that, although reticent about gropings and thrustings, The Return of the Native attaches enormous importance to sex. While I was mesmerized by the superficiality of Blackboard Jungle and suchlike novels, I somehow failed to observe that Thomas Hardy was very very serious about love and lust, loyalty and betrayal, passion and jealousy — and that The Return of the Native challenges its readers to acknowledge that sexuality was as dangerous as it was redemptive. Was there a more important lesson for me to have learned? Did my sixteen-year-old self catch the least glimmer of it? Not the slightest.

"Crosspatch, draw the latch" and Industrial Capitalism

One of the most joyful of nursery rhymes, and a personal favorite, is this:

                               Crosspatch,

                               Draw the latch.

                               Sit by the fire and spin.

                               Take a cup,

                               And drink it up.

                               Then call the neighbors in.

The clicky rhymes and jaunty meter are undeniably beautiful -- and there's much more meaning than poems of this kind usually contain.

In the first triad, a "crosspatch," -- a "cross or ill-tempered person, usually a girl or woman" -- is at work, spinning. In the second triad, she's exhorted to drink and also to invite her neighbors "in" -- presumably into the room, or just as likely, the tiny cottage -- where she lives alone. In the first strophe, the theme is isolation, but in the second, isolation is challenged by the calls of society and by the hope of a more satisfactory and convivial life.   

What can we know or imagine about the surly individual addressed by the evocative designation, "crosspatch?"  The first element in the name --"cross"-- implies not only sourness, but also resistance, as in "cross-grained." The second element -- "patch" -- suggests that the crosspatch's discontent is not without cause. We can infer that she's poor because she's a person whose garments are either assembled from various rescued materials, as in "patchwork," or that her clothes are, in another sense of the word patch, repaired. In addition, it's possible that ill health has caused her skin to become "patchy."  But "patch" also signals a degree of mental stress, as in Shakespeare's "patched fool." In this signification, patch derives from Italian pazzo, crazy. The crosspatch is therefore disabled physically, socially and psychologically.

At the outset of the poem, our "crosspatch" sits glowering, impoverished, perhaps muttering indistinctly, friendless, without family, her youth blighted by poverty, huddled against the last embers of her dying fire. What is it that she is spinning? No doubt she ekes out a meager living in the impersonal mercantilist "putting-out" system. Some exploitative proto-capitalist venturer has delivered to her lonely door a quantity of unspun wool or cotton;  her job is to return the material to him in the processed form that will then be passed on to an equally poor weaver, then to a tailor, etc. She works alone and never sees the fruits of her labor except for the occasional, paltry farthing that allows her a bare subsistence. No wonder she is slightly barmy and has "drawn the latch" -- closed herself off from her fellows. But then, suddenly, comes the antistrophe, and in a series of importunate injunctives the crosspatch is asked to rejoin the company of humanity. "Take a cup,/ And drink it up,/ Then call the neighbors in."  What's in the cup?  Spiritous liquors, no doubt, which, though designed to dull the pain of wage-slavery, also act to augment the revelry with which the poem climaxes. The wine is not sipped, but it is drained to the lees. And once the door is unlatched, and the neighbors -- neighbors of both sexes, no doubt -- are called "in," why then, let the libations and the wild rumpus begin! Alienated labor is suddenly set aside and replaced by the natural bonds of one human being to another, and the stasis of the opening lines of the poem transforms in a flash into a wildly kinetic bacchanal. Emotional weakness transmutes into healthy liberated pleasure. Dour Puritanism, with its punishing work ethic, yields to the spirit of holiday and to pagan, perhaps even dionysian, excess. Here, in miniature, is the essence of the comic vision. In a few powerful lines, freedom, good humor, and natural appetite triumph over bondage, artificiality, social constriction and repression; the justifiably sullen crosspatch, in a burst of energy, reintegrates herself into the social nexus from which she has been banished.

Whether or not the crosspatch can permanently liberate herself from the oppressions of industrial capitalism, or whether the anodyne and spurious relief of alcohol is a merely transient solution is left unresolved. To ask a short poem, however dense with meaning, to answer so difficult a question would, just possibly, be to ask too much of it and, perhaps, to push the evidence the merest tad too far.

"Barefoot to Palestine"

I'm enchanted by a sentence in Othello that is spoken by Desdemona's lady-in-waiting, Emilia. She's helping Desdemona to undress and the two women are engaged in informal chat. Desdemona, perhaps wondering why she had the misfortune to fall in love with exotic Othello, allows her mind to wander. It comes to rest on a countryman of hers, a good-looking man named Ludovico. And then her interlocutor Emilia praises handsome Ludovico in words that should compel every sentient being to gasp in astonishment and admiration.

About Ludovico, Emilia makes a remarkable claim: "I know a lady in Venice would have walked barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip."

All that needs to be said is, wow! But let me try to explain why the sentence so transfixes me.  

It's hyperbole, but not the ordinary hyperbole of largest or smallest or coolest or most awesome. It's a hyperbole beyond hyperbole. A lesser writer might have said, "I know a lady who would have walked a long way to make love to him." Not Shakespeare. For "a long way," Shakespeare give us "barefoot to Palestine"; for "make love" he offers "a touch of his nether lip." It's extravagant and wheeling.

A hike, shod, to the holy land, would have been a long and exacting journey. Barefoot, beyond belief. The evocative word "Palestine" infuses religion and sanctity into a sentence about sex and desire -- and therefore generates a love-longing that is as powerful, as silly, and as ill-planned as a crusade. And for what aim? Not even, for this mythical lady hiker, a big, zonking, mouth-filling kiss; simply for the merest contact of lips. No, not even lips, just one lip -- the lower one. It's an hyperbole of minimalism.

In the poetry that Shakespeare knew from his childhood, it was men who would make the vows and undergo the trials to court their beautiful ladies. But this lovely sentence reverses the convention. It is, so to speak, Sadie Hawkins day in Venice. 

Emilia elsewhere asserts that women have desires as strong as lovers of the other sex; here she demonstrates that women's love-longing can be as ridiculous (and as powerful) as men's. 

And everyone who knows Othello will hear in the word "Palestine" an intimation of the violent act that once, many years ago, shook Aleppo.

Another Gosse-Pearlman Xmas

And so we've come to the end of the "holiday season" once again.

Another Christmas, another winter solstice, another St. Lucy's day with its deepest of midnights. Even here in ever-sunny Colorado, things are a bit gloomy. However, I have every confidence that another spring is just around the corner. I don't need to bring greenery into the house in order to prevent the dragon from swallowing the sun. The days, now so abbreviated, will lengthen and in five weeks we'll see the first crocuses and a week later the daffodils and pussy-willows. It's going to happen. But as always, the last days of the year challenge me.

I'm relieved and happy that Christmas and the whole Christmas business is done and gone. No one wants to be a scrooge and I don't want to frown on carols and gift-giving and plum-puddings and good fellowship, but in my heart, let me confess, I don't like the holiday. I can't make sense of the virgin birth or the sacrifice of the only-begotten son. I don't even respect the story-- to me it's just dressed-up scapegoating. Moreover, Jesus' revolutionary message about caring for the poor seems to be ignored or repudiated by Christianity's most vociferous advocates. And then there's all that incongruous stuff that has accreted around Christmas -- the hype and the commercialism and the religious chauvinism and the reindeer and the tactless triumphalism. It's both incomprehensible and offensive to me.

And I'm in good company. I have allies. Let us go back to the beginning of the American experience with Christmas.

If the profoundly religious seventeenth-century founders of our country had a single favorite Biblical moment, it's when the Lord (speaking through His prophet Amos) severely condemned the vanity of holidays. "I hate," said the Lord, "I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies." The Lord of Hosts specifically enjoined against the attempt to placate him by sacrificing animals (a matter of topical concern in Amos's time). "Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them; neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts." Nor did He rest with these easy-to-follow injunctions, but He went on to condemn all musical tributes as well. Nor more chants, glees or carols: "Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols." Our Puritan forefathers recognized that the Lord opposed not only rituals and music but all formal observances and rote piety. The Ancient of Days was moved not by empty ceremony but by right action and good behavior. Instead of squeaking timbrels and sounding brass, why, "let justice run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream." Taking these uncompromising sentences as their guide, our founders dug in their heels against the ostentatious celebration of all holidays, especially Christmas.

I applaud the old guy, the Father, and I revere Amos. His mantra bears repeating: "Let justice come down as the waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream." 

The neglect of "righteousness" in favor of buying things makes me melancholy. I would be happy to see fewer purchases and more good deeds. It would help us through the dark months.

The winter solstice is a sensitive time for me because it's the anniversary of my father's birthday. He arrived to no poorer family on the planet on the darkest day of the year, the twenty-second of December, 1904. ‘And they called his name Emanuel, God with us,’ -- but whether by accident or design, I have no idea. My father lived a long and just life. He had many virtues -- one of them that he was the least materialistic person ever. He had no possessions and craved none. But he was righteous.

I don't know how anyone could write a biography of Emanuel, my father. There was so little plot, so little conflict in his life. He went about his business, raised his family, kept to the straight and narrow. His memory is a blessing to us.

At this time of the year I turn once again to one of the most challenging fathers in literature. The voluminous works of Sir Edmund Gosse are not much read nowadays except by specialists in Edwardian literature, but Father and Son (1907) still stands as one of the world's great autobiographies. 

The father in Father and Son is the biologist Philip Henry Gosse, whom Charles Darwin once called "an honest hod carrier of science." The older Gosse was a minister and a leader of the Plymouth Brethren, a very strict, very puritanical splinter of English Protestantism -- one that could easily have taken Amos as its prophet and leader. According to his son Edmund, P. H. Gosse held that the celebration of Christmas was "nothing less than an act of idolatry. The very word is Popish, [my father] used to exclaim, 'Christ's Mass!' Then he would adduce the antiquity of the so-called feast, adapted from horrible heathen rites, and itself a soiled relic of the abominable Yule-Tide. He would denounce the horrors of Christmas until it almost made me [that is, Philip Henry's son Edmund Gosse the autobiographer] blush to look at a holly berry." 

A passionate man, Philip Henry Gosse. A difficult father. Can we Imagine how Philip Henry Gosse would have suffered to behold a twentieth-century American Christmas: muzaked "Silent Night" in a shopping mall. Or even --horror of horrors --the odious, saccharine "Little Drummer Boy." There's not a sappier song in all of creation.

In Father and Son, Sir Edmund recollects a Christmas of his youth. One boyish year he defied his father and, putting his immortal soul in danger, secretly ate some Christmas plum-pudding that had been offered to him by 'rebellious' servants. But then, overcome with guilt and stomach-ache, he flew to his father, crying out "Oh! Papa, Papa, I have eaten of flesh offered to idols!" Philip Henry then "ran with me into the midst of the startled servants, seized what remained of the pudding,... and ran till we reached the dust-heap, when he flung the idolatrous confectionery on to the middle of the ashes, and then raked it deep down into the mass." 

A frightening episode for a nine-year-old -- but beautifully told. Only an accomplished writer of comedy (and one who was steeped in Dickens) could have invented a phrase as marvelous as "idolatrous confectionery," where the triviality of the noun undermines the high seriousness of the adjective.

Compared to Amos and to the Plymouth Brethren and to Philip Henry Gosse, my own resistance to Christmas is trivial. I'm a dissenter, but a dissenter in moderation.

In fact, I'm not even a Puritan -- I'm delighted with the baked ham and the sweet potatoes. Moreover, I have devised a Christmas custom of my own. Every December 25, I reserve three hours to listen to Handel's Messiah -- not out of piety or reverence, but because the oratorio is so marvelous that it's almost -- almost -- sacred.

There are many Messiahs, but In our house, the performance of choice is, inevitably, the extremely intelligent Pearlman version (Boston Baroque Orchestra and Chorus-- Martin Pearlman, Conductor [Telarc 80322]). Blessings and honor and glory and hallelujahs be unto George Frederick Handel and unto his unsurpassed oratorio.

So this year and every year: rejoice greatly but appropriately, ye sons and daughters of Zion! 

Anemoia

The premise of Riley Black's The Last Days of the Dinosaurs (New York, 2022) is a most splendid one. Imagine, she proposes, that it is 66 million years ago and dinosaurs are the monarchs of the earth. What was it like, in that era, to be alive in, say, the steamy forests where Wyoming now lies -- a world in which club-tailed ankylosaurs were tracked by tyrannosaurs while primitive mammals scuttled in the ferny underbrush. Rich and strange, certainly. And then, how was it all transformed on "the worst day in the history of the planet" when the Chicxulub asteroid plowed into the Yucatan? One fine day, the dinosaurs were triumphant; and then in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the six-mile-wide asteroid crash lands and everything goes all kablooey -- the sure and firm-set earth shakes, the atmosphere turns furnace hot, and acid rain and smoke and fire and tsunamis snuff out 80 per cent of our planet's animal species.

It's a fabulous idea for a masterpiece of science writing, and consequently I'm grieved to report that The Last Days of the Dinosaurs is a disappointing book. It is loose and melodramatic and outrageously padded -- a thirty page essay turned into a swollen three hundred page opus. It's much too pop; it's insufficiently serious and therefore leaves poor frustrated me craving data and detail rather than reiteration. Who could believe that the high drama of Chicxulub could become quite so tedious? I put the blame on Ms. Black's literary agent, who, I have no shadow of doubt, advised her to "turn your idea into a book, and keep it easy -- not too technical -- you'll sell a lot more copies."

What a shame, because Black is well-informed and writes with intermittent flair. She loves her reptiles, and in particular displays genuine warmth, almost reverence, for every young person's favorite dinosaur, the tyrannosaurus rex. An infatuation that lingers from her childhood, I suspect. I myself, not similarly transfixed, might have supposed that T. Rex had been expelled from the Terrible Lizard Hall of Fame sometime in the 1990s, when it came to be gospel that the 60-foot tall monster was not a top-of-the-food-chain predator but merely a snuffling scavenger. Was it not revealed to us that the creature's meager brain was dwarfed by its olfactory bulbs, so that it could effortlessly detect decaying flesh over the unbounded western landscapes? And was it not also agreed that its puny forelegs were useless for pursuit or attack? Black will have nothing of such paleontological revisionism. Her T. Rex is a hunter, lurking in ambush to pounce and to crunch with one powerful bite the enormous protuberant osteoderms that protected the stegosaurus spine. To me, the idea that a beast as gigantic as a tyrannosaurus could conceal itself behind bush or boulder and sneakily lunge at its prey seems totally ludicrous.

Black, bless her kindly heart, firmly embraces the unrevised T. Rex. Her loyalty is transcendent. In a burst of psychological overkill, she describes her crush on the dinosaur as an example of anemoia. And what, readers rightly ask, is anemoia?  It's an unfamiliar word that describes a baffling concept. Upon investigation,"anemoia" turns out to be a recent coinage, a "fire-new" word (as WS, in LLL, calls such innovations). It's "a nostalgia for a time one has never known," such as Black seems to feel about the years and days that preceded Chicxulub. And here I must once again reveal my want of imagination. Anemoia, however hard I labor to grasp the idea, is too subtle for my downright brain. Isn't it the case that "nostalgia" is by definition a cherishing of something in one's own personal history, as such a one as I might remember with warmth a concert or a wedding or that long ago glorious day in which I, batting leadoff, started the game with a triple to right field.

I can't quite fathom a nostalgia for something I've not known in my own person. The emotion that Black describes I would call simple curiosity. I'm as intrigued as the next guy about the past and I can certainly summon a yearning to have been present at some great historical event, but I wouldn't call it anemoia. For example, I might wish that I had been at Fenway on September 30, 1960, the day that Ted Williams blasted a home run on his very last time at bat -- but I wasn't there and it would be a falsehood to claim otherwise. [Full disclosure: I was in attendance, just behind third base, the previous day, September 29, and therefore missed the moment by a scant twenty-four hours.] Unlike Black, I'm not anemoiac about the dinosaur-dominated world of the K-P boundary, but I have other anemoiac -- as I've now redefined the word -- yearnings.

My most pressing and immediate wish would be to have joined the crowd at a performance at the Globe Theatre in London, perhaps of Hamlet in 1599 or Macbeth in 1606. Why? Because even though Shakespeare's works have been studied microscopically for more than 400 years, no one really knows how those plays originally looked or sounded. My suspicion is that they were far more foreign, more strange, less realistic and more primitive than scholars recognize. After all, the most brilliant play ever written, King Lear, was performed in daylight and the actors had to project their voices to a crowd of 2000 people, many of them shuffling about, gossiping, and cracking hazelnuts. No sets, no curtains, no lighting, and no scenery to speak of. I'd guess that the cast employed a style of dramaturgy closer to its medieval inheritance of allegorical representation than we like to admit. Furthermore, I am convinced that if I were present there at the actual Globe, I would discover an endless series of unknown unknowns. Unimaginable unknowns, that would knock our anemoiac socks off. The past is another country; they do things a heck of a lot differently there.

But wait! My dormant anemoia, now aroused, yearns to experience in my own person other events in the past. Where else to indulge my wants? Certainly in Athens, at a performance of a play by Sophocles -- which I can guarantee to be a hundred times stranger than anything London could possibly offer.

But why only the arts?  Now that I think of it, I would love to take a gander at forested Manhattan Island when Henry Hudson's Half Moon made its first landfall. I could have talked to the Lenapes; tried to warn them about the dangers that were coming down the pike. And there's much more. Just prior to struggling through The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, I read Marie Favereau's The Horde (2021), a most fascinating history of the Mongol civilization that conquered and controlled the area from Hungary in the west to Korea in the east during the 13th century and the first half of the 14th. Favereau's depiction of the Mongols was novel and disorienting, essentially because I'm accustomed to think about great empires as centered on a dominant imperial city -- Athens, Rome, London. I believe that I understand a little of what life might have been like in Rome; after all, I've read some of the ancient historians and I know a bit about cities. I've even toured Pompeii, for goodness sake! But the Mongols did not live in cities; they were not particularly literate, they were unabashedly polygamous, animist, and almost entirely nomadic. It's a challenge to imagine a "city" of a hundred thousand people in constant migratory motion. When Mongol men went to war, which they seemed to do often and always, they brought along the women and children, the cattle-drawn carts and wagons and the felt tents along with their horses, goats and sheep. To spend time with a wandering horde, an entirely unfamiliar form of civilization, and to try to understand their mental world, would certainly challenge and enlarge my (and your) conception of what it means to be a human being.

Favereau doesn't dwell on such speculations (she is more concerned with military history than social or psychological matters) but nevertheless the ways in which the migrants related to each other and to their environment had to be entirely foreign to us mostly urban, post Age of Reason moderns. What was it like to be a Mongol? Perhaps I feel this question personally because a recent examination of my DNA tells me that I'm 1% Asian by genetic inheritance. I assume, naturally, that like approximately 16,000,000 other people, I'm directly descended from Mongol leader Chinggis (formerly Genghiz) Khan through one of his seven wives or his innumerable concubines. Is it anemoia, a recognition of my kinship to Grandpa Genghiz, that has produced in me, this morning, such a wildness in the blood? Or is it the caffeine?

In actual fact, although I'm most curious about Mongol life, I don't think that I would have made a good nomad. In the first place, I suffer from serious directional disabilities and would no doubt promptly misplace myself on the vast and featureless Eurasian steppe; and secondly, I lack enthusiasm for subsisting on kumis, the fermented mare's milk which was the staple of the Mongol diet.

Let me now admit that while I indulge some pseudo-anemoia for my distant Mongol forebears, I feel much closer to my more recent Ukrainian shtetl ancestors. If I could be plopped down in the western Ukraine, I might be able to absorb the texture of life in Staroconstantinov in 1895, just before brave Isaiah and Eta set out for America.  As things stand, I know almost nothing of any importance about the lives of my eastern European ancestors. How did these resilient folks survive centuries, millennia,  of dearth, disease and pogroms? What did they eat? Where did they sleep? What, indeed, did they do for "fun," if they had any conception of fun? What did they read? How did the sexes relate to each other? How did they find privacy? And most significantly: how seriously did they embrace that narrow, all-encompassing and demanding religion?

A nineteenth-century shtetl seems impossibly foreign and faraway, but in the longer time frame, it's actually very recent. The most distant past that we can readily imagine is when the archeological record begins to appear -- perhaps five thousand year ago. But my and your fully human ancestors migrated from the Olduvai Gorge some 60,000 years ago, which leaves approximately 55,000 years without any data at all -- or at least nothing beyond the merest occasional trace. For these many millennia our forbears lived in world where there were no cities, no writing, no pottery, no weaving, no domesticated plants or animals, no metals, no wheels and therefore no vehicles -- only stone hand axes and later spears and much later still bows and arrows. Two thousand five hundred precarious generations of foraging! I would like to see for myself how our common ancestors managed to survive when the gigantic short-faced bear competed for the cave and the terrifying European lion lurked in the shadows. I suspect also that the most dangerous predator our g g g... grandfathers faced was the tribe next door -- otherwise why would we have inherited such hostility to people who look or act just slightly differently than ourselves. Wouldn't it be profoundly anemoiac to join a family of our mutual forebears for a week or two and participate with them as they went about their lives?

What a treasure-trove of unknown unknowns would we confront!

It's Big! We're Little!

Can it possibly be true that the universe as we know it is becoming larger and larger? The more we learn, the more it seems to expand. The scientists who know about such things now brag that the Milky Way numbers between 200 and 300 billion stars, nearly all of which are probably circled by planets. Moreover, these same experts now claim that there are something like one or two trillion such configurations -- some of them small but most larger than our own personal galaxy. And to top all that, there's a rumor circulating that our universe might be just one of an untold, possibly infinite number of other universes. Some of them Big Banging, some expanding, some collapsing.

These numbers are staggering and incomprehensible, at least to me. I can't even get a hold of a million of anything, even grains of sand, let alone a billion (a thousand million!) enormous stars.

Now they tell me that our universe began 13.8 billion years ago, more or less, and will go on for a hundred billion more. That's another very large number for me (or you) to assimilate. 

It's all mighty perplexing. And then let me add the toughest question of all: why is there something rather than nothing? Yes, why is that? How come?

There are some who find this sort of information dismaying because it confirms the triviality, the meaninglessness of our individual lives. How can I possibly worry about last night's insomnia or my latest nosebleed -- or indeed my very own life -- in a world of a gazillion planets, stars, ultramassive black holes, neutron stars, galaxies, and a universe which may have no discernible boundary or beginning or ending.

Yet I myself find all this information not dismaying but comforting - maybe even inspiring.

What are the odds that a planet might support life? Very small. And that the planet's precarious lifeforms would evolve for a couple of billions of years and then generate intelligent life?  And that a million years of mating and surviving by various evolving primitive and then recognizable humans might lead to my ancestors -- and that after thousands of lucky matings eventually resolve into my parents Manny and Lil who happened upon the precise instant to beget Me. And that I, in the second half of my 80s, way past my shelf life, would still be here to enjoy these extra innings.

All this work of creation and evolution and luck to culminate in Me.  

It's a miracle of cosmic proportions and should be hosannahed. Here I am, enjoying my still functioning brain. My stomach is mellow after a full meal and my skin is glowing from a stroll in the warm sun. At the end of the day, I will crawl under the covers with my bedmate and ladylove. Truly the stars have aligned to my benefit.

Nor let us not underestimate  the consummate joy of mattress and blanket.

My assemblage of molecules has had a great run -- much more than could be reasonably anticipated.  Soon my molecules will disassemble and then reassemble into someone else. I'm very glad to contribute to this phenomenon. 

But if so -- if we are so fortunate, as I believe us to be, why don't we as a people celebrate our good fortune? Take pleasure in our lives. What's the need for this continuing strife and wars and enslavements and genocides? What's the point of it? We're all sitting here, billions of us, for a second or so in an infinitely boundless and timeless universe. Why must half of us make life miserable for the other half? Why can't all we just get along?

Truly we are a horrid species.

I wonder whether other planets that support intelligent life have done any better. I hope so.

Cornell English Then and Now -- 6

After struggling through a run of mysterious and puzzling works, I'm cheered to discover a book written by Cornell English faculty member that I could read with pleasure from beginning to end. And understand. And which alerted me to books and poems with which I was not familiar. No theory, no pretentious jargon; just honest scholarship and intelligent stylish analysis, 

It's Facing the Abyss, American Literature and Culture in the 1940s, by George Hutchinson, who is Cornell's Farr Professor of American Culture.

Unlike Professor Hutchinson, who is a considerably younger man, I myself was alive (although barely sentient) during the 1940s. I was too young for serious reading, so 1940s culture didn't come to my aluminum desk until the 1950s when I belatedly came to awareness. As a result, I read many of the books that Hutchinson discusses a decade past their relevance. Hutchinson also mentions many influential books that I didn't read at all and therefore came as a surprise -- and which underlined my ignorance. For example, during the 1950s, my high school and college years, I read many books of 1940s Jewish American writers to whom Hutchinson devotes a long chapter: Mailer, Bellow, Malamud, Rukeyser, Arthur Miller, etc. But my acquaintance was incomplete. I confess that I had never heard the names of Jo Sinclair or Isaac Rosenthal, both of whom Hutchinson scrutinizes at full. One name missing from Hutchinson's survey is J D Salinger, who started to publish in the 40s but only became famous with Cather in the Rye in 1951. Just as well -- I never caught Salinger fever although many of my friends were quite infected. 

Hutchinson has presented me with a reading list of books that I should have known but didn't and that will keep me engaged for months. I'm grateful.

Hutchinson's chapter on WWII is most revelatory. Without being unduly partisan, it exposes and corrects the "greatest generation" mythology that I had half come to accept. 

After reading Facing the Abyss, I continued my investigation of Cornell English faculty publications by taking a couple of wild swings at Elizabeth S. Anker's mystifying On Paradox, the Claims of Theory (Duke UP, 2022). (Anker holds a joint appointment in Cornell's law school and its Department of Literature in English.) I can say just two things for certain about this difficult book: a) I didn't understand two consecutive sentences, and b) it's not about literature, not even tangentially. In fact, I'm not sure what it's about -- as far as I can tell, it's not about the law. I have rarely attempted anything in English prose that I found quite so impenetrable. I never even grasped what Anker means by paradox.

I'm sure it's mea maxima culpa, but so be it. 

 

[April 4] PGB writes: "Every time you post something, it becomes ever clearer that you're not the right person for this investigation. Give it up and stick to something within your abilities, like basketball. You write well on basketball. Do yourself a favor: stay away from the deeper issues that Anker discusses."

[April 4]  Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Perhaps you're right, PGB (whoever you are). The shoemaker should stick to his last. This Anker book is not intended for me, but I I wonder for whom it is intended. It's got to be an extremely small specialized audience. Six or eight people, worldwide. I doubt anyone on Cornell's English faculty then or now could make heads or tails of it."

[April 6]  Artie Greengroin writes: "Thanks for hanging in there.  I hope you find other Cornell English Professors who know how to write English. I'm not optimistic, though. BTW, I think PGB is harshing on you, but I agree that your basketball essays are pretty good."

[April 8] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Thanks for the recommendation, Artie and PGB. If anyone is interested, my basketball essays are here.

[April 9]  Charles Evans (Mercer College) writes: "I agree. Vivian, your notes on basketball are quite good. But you're just not smart enough to understand philosophy."

[April 10] Joe J. Keen (Northwest Nazarene University, Nampa, Idaho) writes: "I agree with Charles Evans. The basketball entries are amusing. But, Vivian, you're no philosopher."

[April 16] Vivian de St. Vrain writes: The "Artie Greengroin" who posted on April 6 does not exist. Artie Greengroin is not a real person; he's a character invented by the WWII novelist Harry Brown. Come on, Artie you can use your real name. Don't be afraid. Don't hide behind a pseudonym. We're all friends here."

[April 30]. Chester Bacon writes: "Thanks for bringing the Hutchinson book to my attention.  I've read and been enlightened by it. But following your recommendation I'll stay away from the Anker book. And I do like your basketball essays."

Driftin'

Every once in a while, I experience something that I call a "cultural convergence" -- perhaps an event reported in a daily newspaper that closely resembles something on the very page of the novel that I happen to be reading. A cross-genre overlap, let us say.

Here's in example of such a coincidence that amused me much.  

Yesterday evening I watched the classic western The Magnificent Seven (1960) and this morning I read, once again, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. It's hard to believe but yes, there is a very brief moment where two such very distinct works brush against one another.  

Unlike TN, The Magnificent Seven is a violent spectacle that steers clear of humor, or subtle characterization or extensive dialogue. After the climactic concluding battle to preserve the Mexican village has been both lost and won, the two surviving gunmen share a moment before trotting off on their separate ways. Chris Adams (Yul Brynner) inquires of Vin Tanner (Steve McQueen) if he has a plan for what comes next. Laconic Vin, cowpoke and gunslinger, responds, "driftin'. 

In Twelfth Night, there's a similar question and a similar answer, but in a far different idiom. Antonio asks Sebastian, who has survived a shipwreck, about his plans. Sebastian's view of his future is essentially the same as Vin's, but there is none of that "ah shucks" minimalism in his reply. Instead, Sebastian responds, "My determinate voyage is mere extravagancy."  

[While Vin's one-word answer is clear as clear can be, Sebastian's "mere extravagancy" requires a bit of a gloss. Nowadays, "extravagancy" (usually "extravagance") signifies a "lack of restrain in purchasing luxury goods." Not so in 1600, when "extravagant" remained much closer to its root etymological inheritance. The word descends from L. vagare, "to wander." Extra-vagance therefore means something like "wander beyond." Here's a more familiar example of the word at work: when Roderigo characterizes Othello as an "extravagant and wheeling stranger," he does not criticize Othello for spending too many ducats on his fancy get-up. He means that he's a rootless and wandering non-native. (Wheeling? my dictionary glosses wheeling as "roving, wandering, drifting"). And also: "mere" did not then connote triviality; its meaning is closer to "pure." "Determinate" meant and still means "decided.")

Therefore Sebastian's sentence --"My determinate voyage is mere extravagancy" -- is directly equivalent to  Vin's "driftin''". Cultural convergence at its best.

It's just two ways of talkin'. 

I sometimes wonder about Shakespeare's intent here. Why did he bother to put such a difficult sentence in Sebastian's mouth? For purposes of characterization, certainly. But at the expense of clarity. Wouldn't it have been more economical, more transparent, for Sebastian to say something plain, such as "I don't have a plan, I'll just wander." It's certain that some percentage of Shakespeare's audience, perhaps most, will not grasp the meaning  of the sentence as written and will be left puzzled. Yet as he so often does, Shakespeare preferred eloquence to transparency. 

In my opinion, Shakespeare delighted in his own fluency.  And sometimes I think that Shakespeare wasn't just writing to be heard by his Globe or Blackfriars audience. He was writing to be read and studied --  although I doubt he could have imagined a future in which his sentences would be glossed with crowded inches of small-type footnotes.

It it possible that Shakespeare also had an inkling that, as Beethoven once put it, he was writing for "a latter age?"

Trump, Chaucer, etc.

Chaucer's Pardoner, some will remember, has long blonde hair and speaks in a high treble voice. Chaucer calls him "a gelding or a mare." A gelding is obviously a eunuch; what Chaucer means by mare is less clear -- perhaps "female eunuch" -- whatever that entails -- or a gay male or possibly even a woman cross-dressed as a man. In any case, a person of ambiguous sexuality -- "gender fluid" in modern idiom. 

Update: the Naval Academy Nimitz library at Annapolis has purged from its shelves a book by Robert S. Sturges called  "Chaucer's Pardoner: Gender Theory." Isn't it reassuring that our national security will no longer be endangered by a discussion of the Pardoner's identity.

The list of 381 censored books can be found at

https://media.defense.gov/2025/Apr/04/2003683009/-1/-1/0/250404-LIST%20OF%20REMOVED%20BOOKS%20FROM%20NIMITZ%20LIBRARY.PDF

New Old Books from the 1940s

I read George Hutchinson's Facing the Abyss, a report on the culture of the 1940. Hutchinson assesses books that were influential during that troubled decade.

When I came of age in the 1950s, I encountered a good share of these books. I was a curious, library-addicted lad and 1940s culture lingered in the 1950s air. Yet Hutchinson brings to attention whole shelves of important writing of which I was shamefully ignorant. Through the resources of Interlibrary Loan and second-hand internet bookstores, I've now become acquainted with a bunch of new old books. Here's some of them (with more to follow). 

Hutchinson claims that Jo Sinclair's Wasteland (1946) is an important contribution to the Jewish-American novel. Perhaps it is, by priority, but I found it disappointing and superficial. The main man, Jacob Braunowitz changes his name to John Brown and hides his Jewishness, but it doesn't work -- he lives in a "wasteland" neither integrated into America nor bolstered by his inherited religion. Along comes a Freudian psychoanalyst and in a few magical sessions Brown is liberated to embrace his Judaism. For me, the novel was simplistic and implausible. Harry Brown's A Walk in the Sun (1944) is the most persuasive and realistic war novel I've ever read -- it accomplishes more in 150 pages that Norman Mailer achieved in 600. Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac (1949 is a pioneering classic of environmentalism -- though nowadays less widely known than Rachel Carson's Silent Spring but much more learned and innovative. It's a very good book but frankly I found the "lyrical" prose a bit too gooey for my taste. Isaac Rosenfeld's Passage from Home is a distinguished novel of adolescent alienation. It's kinky (about a boy's semi-sexual relationship to his deceased mother's sister). It's a far better novel, I think, than Salinger's similar and imitative Catcher in the Rye. What a pity that Rosenfeld died of a heart attack at age 38!  A great loss to literature. I also read Anatole Broyard's Kafka Was the Rage, a memoir of Greenwich Village in the 1940s although not published until 1985. It's a noteworthy collection of short essay, able to be much more candid about sex and sexuality than if it had appeared during the time it chronicles. Broyard claims that 1946 was the best year ever: the war was over and he had freedom and the G I Bill. 

A pretty good for me too -- in 1946 just seven years old, sitting on the sunny stoop eating raisins.

Wisdom from my Father

When dealing with a child, always make your appeal to the better side of his/her nature. 

No one owns anything; the most you can say is that you have a lifetime lease on it.

As far as I can tell, I am just a long link in a chain going from nowhere to nowhere.

If you lose your man, go directly to the basket. 

Never omit an opportunity to do a favor for a friend, and never be embarrassed to accept a favor from a friend.  People like to help one another.

Anyone can make money if he makes it the sole business of his life to do so.

When the stock market is going up, everyone is  a genius.

The czars and the rabbis kept our family in darkness for a thousand years. It took hundreds of years for us to fight our way out of the ghetto, and they (the orthodox and the Hasids) want to put themselves back in it.

Don't forget to wash behind your ears.

Mary Antin, The Promised Land (1911)

I have just read Mary Antin's autobiography, The Promised Land, first published in 1911. It is a book that I should have known much earlier in my life but only discovered a week or so ago. The larger part The Promised Land is the familiar story of immigrant life in a new country -- the author's struggles to adapt to an unfamiliar culture, her achievements and triumphs, and her unabashed flag-waving patriotism. More strange and more informative, is the picture of life "old country," as viewed through the eyes of a young woman.  Antin grew up in provincial, impoverished Polotzk, a small city now in Belarus, but which at various times has been administered and exploited by the ungentle hands of Varangians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Germans. During Antin's youth (she was born in 1881), Polotsk was a part of Russia. It was not a good time to be a Jew in Polotsk or indeed anywhere within the Pale of Settlement. (Her story is especially pertinent because I myself have a hunk of Belarusian-Jewish genes -- as do, therefore, my children and grandchildren.) 

Antin's life in that bleak part of the world was, I think, triply suppressed. In political freedom and standard of living, by the Russians; in domestic and personal relations, by oppressive Hasidism and the rabbis who enforced its demanding rules; and thirdly, because Antin had the misfortune to be born female. She had every reason to leave Polotsk behind.   

Antin recognized early that she was a "prisoner" because "the Czar" commanded Jews to stay within the Pale. She "accepted ill usage from the Gentiles as one accepts the weather. The world was made in a certain way and I had to live in it." Polotsk was a place of constant ethnic strife fueled by dangerous superstitions. "The Gentiles said that we had killed their god and that we used the blood of murdered Christian children in the Passover." The Jewish community of Polotsk was always under threat of violence -- "the peasants would fill themselves with vodka, and set out to kill Jews. They attacked with knives and clubs and scythes and axes, killed them or tortured them, and burned their houses. This was called a pogrom." There was also the threat of the draft, where recruits served until the age of 41. (My maternal grandfather, Joseph (Usilewski) Green told me that he had been drafted into the Russian army for a twenty-year term; I now understand that he must have entered the army at age 21. In 1904 Grandpa, age 26, deserted and came to America. Good move.) Some men escaped the draft by paying crippling bribes to conscription officers. Taxation was onerous. "Peace cost so much a year in Polotsk."

Antin also explains that as stifling as was the Czar, the rules of religion were harsher. "Within the wall raised by the vigilance of the police, another wall, higher, thicker, more impenetrable was the religion of  the Jews." The rabbis favored piety (as they conceived it) to independence or freedom or prosperity and they enforced the most minute regulations and prohibitions of all actions day and night. Antin tells of a wife who found a blemish on the chicken she was preparing to cook. She consulted the rabbi who pronounced the chicken traif. That night, the family went hungry.

Polotsk seems to have had no dissenters or freethinkers, or at least none that Antin notes. I imagine that those who challenged orthodoxy either left of their own accord or were shunned.

Girls were offered little outside the family kitchen or nursery.  They were expected to marry young and produce many children, especially sons who could distinguish the family with their Torah studies. Schooling was discouraged for girls, who were taught to pronounce but not understand Hebrew. 

At its prime, Polotsk had 60,000 inhabitants, perhaps 60 per cent of whom were Jewish. There were twenty-three synagogues. Today there are no synagogues and no Jews.

Gravestones

I've never visited my parents' graves. I don't even know where they are buried. I've been told that my father is buried between my mother and his sister Mollie, but I don't know where they lie. I have a paper that tells me where my sister Susan, who died as an infant, is buried, but I've never been there. I don't know where my brother Eugene lies.

I know exactly where Althea and Phyllis are buried -- just up the hill, under the big maple. I visit once a year and bring a stone to place on their markers. Phyllis's is a bronze plaque affixed to a stone; Althea's is just the capital letter A and her dates (1939-2016). It's what she wanted.  

Dan Goss is buried in Staten Island somewhere. I visited once, with Althea. A's mother, Grandma Anne, wanted her ashes divided in half and spread, part with Phyllis and part with Dan.  She has no gravestone, nor wanted one.

I have told my family that I want my tombstone to read, "No more insomnia, forever." But that's a joke.  

Nowadays it's the custom to scatter the ashes on a favorite place, which is nice, but there's no place to visit. Especially no place for those buried at sea.

Words of My Life -- Text

I first encountered the word "text" -- as did everyone else of my cohort -- as the first component of "textbook." At P S 217, textbooks were issued on the first day of school. Then, later in the day, we ritually scissored brown paper grocery bags and improvised protective book covers. It was not unusual for the covers to be in better shape than the retirement-eligible books. At college, I was surprised to find that I was required to purchase my own textbooks -- a discovery that busted a hole in my precarious budget. 

And then the word "text" sat still for a number of years until it emerged as a term of art in critical theory. "Text" became a generic word for anything written: novels, poems, plays, signs, advertising slogans, tattoos -- anything that could be analyzed and discussed. I think, in retrospect, that the idea was not to "privilege" one form of writing over another. "Text" is to poem as "provider" is to doctor.

Nowadays, "text" has emerged from the gloom of academic criticism and has become the most frequently used of words. Who could have predicted it? I myself, formerly a writer of letters and postcards and until recently of emails, and for many years at one point a user of the telephone, now send and receive multiple "texts" in a day.

The noun has also acquired a variety of verb forms: "I'll text you"; "I texted you";   "Text me when you arrive"; "Talk to you later.  I'm texting."

All derived, ultimately, from L. texere textus, to weave; or textor, a weaver.

The use of "text" in religious ceremony, as in a cleric's, "today's text is..." has never been a part of my life.

Cornell English Then and Now - 4

Vivian de St. Vrain writes: "Cathy Caruth is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of English at Cornell University. She has written quite a number of books but the one that I selected for this Cornell English Department project, partly because of its engaging title, is Literature in the Ashes of History. Alas, the title is misleading, because Caruth doesn't concern herself with literature in any recognizable way. Rather, the book investigates psychoanalytic theories, especially of loss and trauma. Although in an earlier part of my life I read and studied all of Freud's major works, I found this book to be far too subtle and abstruse for my downright brain. I have therefore asked assistance from my long time friend A. Barnett Langdale, Jr. Barney is a very smart medical school graduate, a therapist, and psychologist (though not a psychoanalyst) and a person for whose opinions I have great regard."

A. Barnett Langdale, Jr., writes: "Thanks, Viv, for entrusting me with the of task of reading and evaluating this book. I fear that I shall disappoint you, because I had a hard time understanding Literature in the Ashes of History. In order to profit from reading this book, one must accept certain assumptions about Sigmund Freud and about the art of psychoanalysis. Caruth sets out to modify and reinterpret the famous fort-da episode in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This became an immediate problem for me, because I have never agreed with Freud's analysis of his grandson's play -- perhaps because his interpretation clashes with what I have  learned from long years of closely observing children in my professional practice. Events such as fort-da can generate a spectrum of meanings and a variety of interpretations equally as valid or invalid as Freud's. As I result, I read this book with a great deal of resistance to its assumptions and their ramifications.

Many of the arguments that Caruth creates ("suggests" is her usual verb) are too arcane for me. She carries her readers away from common sense. She inhabits an intellectual world in which every event or fact carries its own negation. And that negation bears a consequent negation, and so on ad infinitum, like the images in a pair of opposed mirrors, leading inevitably to a situation in which, as Macbeth says, "function/ Is smothered in surmise and nothing is/ But what is not."

Vivian de St. Vrain responds: 'Many thanks, Barney. In the course of reading Literature in the Ashes of History, I came to think that its procedure is, in a sense, a lot like theology. If you make certain assumptions about god and angels and creation, you can generate a fantastically complicated superstructure of ideas that has absolutely no relations to the world in which we dwell. This book is not theology, it's psychoanalytic theory, but it shares a similar procedure, because, despite its highly-elaborated complexity, its assumptions are unprovable if not absolutely false. Intelligence and sophistication can take you only so far. I'm afraid that in the end, there's no more heft in this kind of study than there is in theology -- the "subject without an object." Ultimately, it's Cloud-Cuckoo-Land." 

 

 

[February 15] Walter Balletto writes: "Before you dismiss this intelligent book out of hand, you might want to read the ecstatic review by Michael Levine in The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis. It's online. Levine makes the effort to read carefully, which neither you nor your friend Langdale do."  

[February 15] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "At first I thought that Mr. Balletto was being ironic, inventing an improbable self-parodic name for an academic journal. Who would believe there is actually such a publication? But I looked it up and, by golly, it's real. Moreover, it's published, mirabile dictu, by the University of Nebraska Press!!!"

[February 16] Janet Rich asks: "You haven't said anything about Caruth's presence in a Department of English. Shouldn't she relocate to Psychology?"

[February 16] Herbert Lecovin (Cornell '61) asks: "I wonder how many of Caruth's colleagues can read and understand her work?"

[February 16] Anita Robillard writes: "Caruth is on an island, and instead of welcoming friends to join her, she erects walls and barricades to keep them out."

[February 17] Joel Salzberg writes: "What do you mean by "island." She teaches at Cornell; Cornell's not an island."

[February 17] Anita Robillard writes: "It's a metaphor, Joel."

[February 17] Herman S. Levi writes: "I don't understand why you compare psychoanalysis to theology. They're nothing alike."

[February 18] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Professor Levi, let me refer you to a familiar passage in the Leviathan, where Hobbes writes of "names that signifie nothing, but are taken up and learned by rote from the Schooles, as hypostatical, transubstantiate, consubstantiate, eternal-Now and the like canting of Schoolemen." Similarly, the words of psychoanalysis, such as pleasure principle, Ego, etc. signify nothing at all. Theologians and psychoanalysts can be very smart people, but the net practical result of their involuted speculation is transitory, wrong, useless, specious, and false."

[April 1]  Skye Barasch writes:  So, Vivian, is there anyone on the Cornell English faculty whose work meets your antiquated approval?  It's all bad, according to you.

[April 1]  Vivian de St, Vrain responds: Actually, Ms/Mr Barasch, I'm just about to add a paragraph on a member of the faculty whose book was very informative and comprehensible. No abstruse jargon, I'm glad to say.  Stay tuned;  my comments will appear here in a day or two. I do wonder, now that I think of it, if I'm unconsciously picking the least approachable books to report on. I'll try to mend my ways.

Cornell English Then and Now -- 5

Elisha Cohn is an associate professor in Cornell's Department of Literatures in English. Her Still Life, Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (2016) strikes me as two books in one. The first is quite lovely and filled with a variety of splendid apercus. Cohn explores "lyric moments" in the novels (confession: I read closely only the chapter on Thomas Hardy, the novelist with whom I'm most familiar). She observes that Hardy (a poet as well as a novelist) occasionally stops the progress of the story and allows his characters to experience a moment of stasis or reflection or reverie that is more a characteristic of lyric poetry than prose. I was much impressed by her analyses of these moments -- and wondered why I had failed to notice such events -- or non-events -- myself. So criticism did what it's supposed to do -- widens our understanding and appreciation of works of literature. I returned to the Victorian novel armed with a new way of seeing. In fact, I'm now reading Little Dorrit again for the express purpose of ascertaining whether a non-poet like Dickens employs the same Still Life method. So far, not the case -- Dickens has his own particular (and very successful) methods of expanding the consciousness of his characters.

Ah, but then there's the other side of Cohn's book which attempts to develop her useful insights within the slough of "theory." I half suspect that Cohn felt obliged to make herself relevant or contemporary or tenure-worthy with her tumble into this quicksand -- but perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps she devoutly believes in an apparatus that I find so incomprehensible and transient. In this second part of the book, many famous names are invoked and admired; some of these are very French and very revered; others  are merely professors at American universities. Pages of text and footnotes defend against the horrid possibility that Still Life might be "insufficiently theorized." And in these speculative paragraphs Cohn discusses the deprivilegization of hierarchical thought in favor of forms of lateralization in which individuations are impersonal and singularities are pre-individual and which reterritorialize along the lines of preexisting structures of power which re-consolidate into static concepts, etc., etc. Which is when I either descend into a reverie (or nightmare) of my own or hurl he book across the room.

 

[February 23  Audrey ap Howell writes:  "Vivian de St. Vrain, you've go it wrong. The notion that there are poetic moments in the novels is well established. The originality of this book lies in its theorizing of these moments. You would know this if you had read carefully and not skimmed." 

[February 24] J C Occhiogrosso writes: "This is a well-written book. Complicated but not obscure."

[February 25]  Reuben Musgrave writes:  "I bet that Cohn is a delightful teacher -- if she keeps to the events in the novels and stays away from bewildering 'theory.'"

[February 25] Savannah Courtermanche writes:  "All novelists pause the plot for moments of reflection. Nothing new here."    

[March 5]  Joy Jourgenson writes:  "This difficult monograph would have been more useful as a series of short, insightful essays.  Too bad it had to be expanded into a repetitive static book. Not the author's fault -- just the tune of the times."

[March 6]  Eli Munn writes:  "Vivian, you're too old and out of it to have an opinion worth anything. Shut it down and go back to your knitting."

[March 15] Rogers Roggen writes:  "I wonder, Vivian, how you can work yourself up into such a snit about Cornell when the USA is going to hell in a handbasket. Shouldn't you put your effort into more pressing matters."

[March 18] Homer vanNess writes:  "Reuben Musgrave, are you possibly the "Cousin Rube" that I heard my parents mention? I know there's a Musgrave branch to my family. (I found your name doing a random googlesearch). If you are Cousin Rube, could you pm me at [email protected]. I'd love to hear from you. I think you went to Cornell; so did I but much later."

 

On the Mall

After a severe cold snap, it's a welcome warm Friday afternoon. We're on the semi-famous mall enjoying a long-postponed promenade. A woman, in her seventies, stops us. "Can you help me?" I'm embarrassed to confess that my first reaction to her plea was that she must be one of our many panhandlers. But not so. She continued: "It's my husband, he has Parkinson's, can you help me get him to the car?" He, Bill, was standing frozen, unable to speak, unable to move, his balance precarious. "Two years ago," she said,"he was robust. He's having a bad day." And indeed he was. I took Bill's left arm under the shoulder, his wife the other arm. Lynn grasped my left hand and carried Bill's useless stick, and together we shuffled him infinitely slowly and gently to the curb. "I thought we could go out for coffee," she said, "but I was wrong." While we stood quietly, Bill's wife went to fetch their car which was parked only fifty feet away. She backed it to where we stood (Lynn now supporting Bill on his right side). We helped Bill into passenger seat. His wife buckled him in.

I asked her, "do you have help?'  "Yes, she said, "friends." "Do you have children?" "Yes, but they don't live nearby." She thanked us generously and drove off.

I was sad for both him and her. He, because his dreadful disease is going to kill him very soon. And she, because her life now consists of morning-to-night care taking -- in bed, out of bed; dressing and undressing; into a comfortable chair for a while and then and out of it; brief awkward walks; three times a day lifting the spoon to his lips. And what's known in the care taking trade as "toileting."

I'm convinced that she doesn't know how bad he is. Caretakers are always behind, always catching up. If she knew, she'd have had a wheelchair at the ready. He needs constant care-- not just family or friends, but professional assistance. Can they afford a place in a memory care facility or nursing home? Not everyone can.

Afterward the incident, we went to a coffee shop -- a normalizing activity for us. But, sitting there, I was shaken. Certainly profound sadness for the ill husband and the encumbered wife, and in addition a touch of personal PTSD. 

And then the inevitable pondering. "To this favor must we come." It's not just Bill. We're all doomed -- even that cute infant in the next booth, rapturously examining her fingertips. A host of diseases, some as bad as Parkinson's, waiting at the door, waiting.

Cornell English Then and Now -- 1

Here's a truth that blows my freakin' mind: since I earned my B. A. in English from Cornell University in 1960, sixty-five years have come and gone. Glaciers have melted and rivers have changed their course since, way back when, in a prior millennium, I was first introduced to serious literature -- to Chaucer and Milton and George Eliot.

My professors in those far-away-and-long-ago days were exclusively male and for the most part veterans of WW2 or the Korean war. They wrote definitive scholarly articles for the Philological Quarterly or for Modern Philology; they published learned monographs on canonical poets and novelists; and they taught courses with such forthright titles as The Seventeenth Century and Wordsworth and Coleridge. Although I was an indifferent student before I arrived at Cornell, I found an intellectual home in the Department of English. Inasmuch as I did not have a brain for rigorous science or for the tough analytic philosophy that was then in fashion, I was fortunate that the work of English suited my limited abilities -- curiosity, patience, a good memory, and something of a feel for language.

Just yesterday (and what, pray tell, prompted me?), I took a peek at the current website of Cornell's English Department. (In the index-card 1950s, when the manual typewriter was the acme of technology, the word "website" would have signified a dark corner colonized by spiders.) Even at first glance, the 2025 Cornell website said to me "very very different, very 'now'." While an occasional word or phrase was recognizable, it was the novelty -- the modernity, I guess -- that flared from the electronic page and dazzled mine eyne. Time marches on, no doubt, but whether it marches boldly forward or plunges over a cliff remains to be established.  

First of all, it's no longer the Department of English. It's now, hurrah!, the "Department of Literatures in English." What a welcome redefinition -- an assertion that English is a world language and that it houses a world literature. Nowadays, if I sit down with a work of fiction, I'm just as likely to read a novel by a writer from Africa or India or Australia as one from the British isles or North America. There's not a reason in the world why Chinua Achebe or Abdulrazak Gurnah should not be studied in an English Department. I respect this shift in focus and I regret that my 1950s Beowulf-to-T. S. Eliot English department was so parochial, so provincial. I can only admire the fact that the Department of Literatures in English has annexed to itself whole continents of writing -- a case of academic imperialism that this time seems wholly right and just.

The website also reveals that, in a nation in which the study of the humanities in higher education is at risk, Cornell's English is a huge thriving enterprise. There are fifty-one people on permanent staff, almost all of professorial rank. Of this number, twenty-seven -- or slightly more than half -- are women. And among those pictured on the site, a significant number are "of color." Undoubtedly, the present department is a far more representative collection of individuals than my 1950s faculty. Moreover, the chair, the associate chair, the director of undergraduate studies, the director of graduate students, and the director of writing are all women. It may once have been the case that the occasional female interloper was a token for display only, but not so now.

And what do these handsome and distinguished men and women study? Fortunately for me, members of the faculty list their areas of concentration. Most claim two or three specialties, some as many as five; a few recalcitrant individuals list none, leaving me to wonder whether they are polymaths or just ornery uncooperative academics. Among the fifty-one, the single expertise most commonly claimed is "cultural studies." This preponderance set me back a bit, because "cultural studies" is not a term I recognize nor one that existed, as far as I know, in the 1950s, when the word "culture" was synonymous with "civilization" -- sometimes just Western Civilization -- and when "cultured" meant something equivalent to "educated" and possibly even "socially established." But now, apparently, "cultural studies" is, and I quote a respected source, "an academic field  that... investigates how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power. These include ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender." Am I correct, and is it possible, for me to infer from this litany of nouns that "cultural practices" comprehends just about everything that we as a society say or do? Clearly the Department of Literatures in English lays claim to a heck of a lot of intellectual territory -- and that it is a far more aggressive entity than is revealed by its mere absorption of Anglophone novels. I was initially suspicious of these extensive claims, but after reflecting a while I recognized that, if I set to one side the self-aggrandizing listing of ideology, ethnicity, class... etc,), cultural studies may in practice simply bring to the forefront such elements as imperialism and nationhood in Robinson Crusoe or race and gender in Othello. Wouldn't it be comforting if "cultural studies" is at least in part merely traditional wine in spiffy new bottles? I, for one, certainly hope so.

After cultural studies, it is "literary theory" that claims the largest group of adherents -- thirteen, or about a quarter of the faculty. This revelation surprised me because I would have guessed that "theory" had long since gone the way of the aurochs and the mouflon. "Theory" had its herd of enthusiasts in its obscurantist heyday in the last century, yet it seems to be alive and kicking at Cornell -- but only, I suspect, as a vestigial remnant of an earlier time and only among the more senior members of the Department.

Following "theory" in popularity among the professoriate are the seven members who stake their claim to "gender studies." Six other say "African-American." The nine who announce a specialty in creative writing may not know that they are the successors and the beneficiaries of the late revered Professor James McConkey. Not a single member of the faculty offers "Shakespeare" or "Milton" as an area of expertise. I do not doubt that the study of gender and African-American and Asian-American literatures is a good thing, but I would have wished that the authors of the finest works of art in all of Anglophonia be accorded equivalent attention and status.   

Would a reincarnated Youthful Me elect take a degree from such a faculty?  I'm skeptical, but I can't say for sure because I don't know whether or not, in the classroom, the scrupulous examination of literature and ideas has been undermined by transitory and faddish ideologies. I must confess that the biases of the website make me feel old and wary and out of touch. And tired.

Well then, what does take place in the classroom?

Let's sample some evidence.

In days of yore, I enrolled in "Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama," a course taught by the distinguished scholar and teacher David Novarr. The course was organized as a chronological march from Kyd and Marlowe in the 1580s right through to Ford and Massinger -- the last playwrights of significance before the theaters went dark in 1642. I remember savoring some delightful comedies by Ben Jonson and Francis Beaumont and also a couple of ferociously brilliant tragedies by Thomas Middleton -- writings, I suspect, that 2020s English majors are not destined to encounter -- even though an acquaintance with these plays is essential background for understanding the timeless works of Shakespeare.  

There's no equivalent course in the present curriculum, but there is an analogue, and it appears in the catalogue of offerings thusly: 

ENGL 3240. Blood Politics:  Comparative Renaissance Drama

Blood is everywhere. From vampire shows to video games, our culture seems to be obsessed with it. The course examines the power of "blood" in the early modern period as a figure that continues to capture our imagination, not only as a marker of racial, religious, and sexual difference and desire, but also as a dramatic player in its own right. How does a politics of blood appear on stage when populations are being expelled and colonized for reasons (mis)understood in terms of blood?.... Topics include honor, revenge, purity, the body, sexuality, conversion, and death.

The course description itself is a mess -- both incomprehensible and meretricious. I'm shocked by the catchpenny pandering. Do 2020s teachers need to lure students into their classrooms with "vampires" and "videos?" The assertion that "blood is a dramatic player in its own right" is nonsense. The description reads like advertising copy for a cheesy low-budget horror flick playing at some louche all-night grind house.

Moreover, "blood" isn't "everywhere." Goodness gracious!

I'm afraid that these entrancing plays are doomed to be put through the "cultural studies" homogenizer. Or "theorized" out of all compass.

Ah, well.

Back in 1960, I had a summer job in Ithaca and therefore happened to be loafing around the campus when the University hosted its returning alumni. Among the returnees were the old folks  -- some few of them members of the class of 1895 -- who had walkered and wheel-chaired to their Sixty-Fifth. Geezers, I thought. It's sobering to realize that those codgers were the same age -- 86 -- as I am now. Should I  return to Ithaca this coming spring, for my very own Sixty-Fifth, I will be perceived by the young 'uns exactly as I observed those Class of 1895 guys: as ancient and irrelevant.

It follows, therefore, that my reservations about the 2025 English curriculum have their exact parallel in the 1895ers perspective on my 1960 curriculum. It's not hard to imagine that they -- I mean the members of the class of 1895 -- who had been educated in elocution and Old Norse, would have been shocked and perhaps outraged by the 1950s "modern" curriculum that I found so enticing and illuminating.

And now, because I don't want to go full curmudgeon and become the kind of superannuated guy who shakes his ebony stick at the modern world and deplores the decline of civilization, I'm going to make an effort to find out what's really going on in 2025. I have therefore set myself the task of reading a representative sample of the books written by members of the present-day English faculty.

I'll report on my studies right here.

Stay tuned.

[January 18] Bernhard Starr writes:  "Vivian, you are right about the course description. It's a disgrace. It's badly written and ridiculous. Why didn't you include the name of the prof. who wrote it?  He/she needs to be exposed. What "populations are being expelled and colonized" by Volpone or The Changeling?  And did you look other course descriptions -- are they equally silly?  What's worst about the course description is that it doesn't respect the plays that the class is going to examine. They're not important interesting dramas to the teacher -- they're just fodder for an ideology. 

[January 19] Vivian de St. Vrain replies: "Mr. Starr, I didn't identify the author of the course description because the website doesn't identify him/her. Just as well. Also, I didn't read other course descriptions though I might do so in the future. I think you're correct that the course description does not respect the dramas or their authors. Which is, as you suggest, mighty disappointing." 

[January 19] Bernhard Starr replies:  "I think I'd rather study Old Norse."

[February 4] Thurston Dale replies:  "I guess I'm a geezer, too (Cornell, '65). I'm glad I majored in English before criticism turned crazy. Great teachers -- Mizener, Abrams, Parrish, Novarr."

[March 17] Anatole Miles Webber writes: "Vivian, you were naive back in the 1950s and you're still naive now. You assume that the Cornell English Department of your youth, 65 years ago, was normative and normal. You were then and still are oblivious to the fact that the Department's 1950 curriculum was the product of stress and change and compromise. Try to remember that there were at least three forces at work and that various faculty members had various degrees of commitment to them. The first group was the oldest -- the traditionalist who studied, as they had always done, literature as history and biography and philology. Get the text and the context right was their primary concern. Then there were the 'new critics" -- heirs to Leavis and Scrutiny in England and the southern agrarians (Ransom, Tate, Warren) in the US. But the main intellectual current riling English Departments were the fierce critics out of New York (mostly Jewish) circles (Kazin, Trilling, Fiedler, Paul Goodman, Irving Howe, etc). In retrospect, even though Cornell brought both Lionel Trilling and Cleanth Brooks to Ithaca during your and my years there, the new winds made little impression on our education. Cornell was peaceful, isolated and non-ideological. It appears from your writing that you preferred it that way and still do. It was stable until the theory people brought in novelty and confusion and excitement.

[April 15] Parnell Pratt replies: "And also monumental pretension. And eventual collapse and failure."

[May 3] Lance Birdseye (Lt., USAF) writes: "What a funny website this is. Hey, folks, join the real world."

 

Cornell English Then and Now -- 3C

I'm a lifelong fan of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. I love all the shipboard stuff, the adventure, the exoticism, Crusoe's self-reliance, his  psychological complexity, his religious ponderings, and especially the recapitulation of nascent capitalism on the island. I'm as entranced as ever by the attempt to domesticate goats, by his attempt to build a boat, by the single footprint on the beach, by Friday's escape and the battle with the cannibals. With a little effort, I have been able to set to one side the novel's faults: the author's careless repetitions, his appalling colonialist racism, those last anticlimactic adventures and the return to England, the unnatural absence of sexuality or passion, the paranoia and the unnecessary violence. Massive defects, yes indeed, but Robinson Crusoe is still a great eternally wonderful mishmash of a novel. 

So it came as a surprise to read Laura Brown's one-sentence summary of the novel in The Counterhuman Imaginary: "Robinson Crusoe enacts a self-creative other-than-human vitality by setting matter in motion through the persistent repetition of irresistible succession."  

Maybe Robinson Crusoe does "enact" and "set matter in motion" -- I don't know, can't say. But I do not plan to undergo the pain and woe of making sense out of her ungainly and mystifying sentence. For Laura Brown, Robinson Crusoe is not the pleasure and challenge that it has been for three hundred years -- it's just raw material for her dry-as-dust ideological machine.

And a waste of my precious time.

 

[February 1] Bernhard Starr writes:  "Brown transforms the gold of literature into the dross of criticism."

[February 1] Professor Merlon Crenelle, Southwestern Louisiana U., writes: "Vivian, you're totally unfair. You take one sentence out of the chapter and make fun of it. You don't even bother to see how the sentence is related to the larger argument. You owe Professor Laura Brown an apology. You're irresponsible."

[February 1] Marianne Morrison, Ph. D. writes: "Vivian, I agree with Mr. (Ms.?) Crenelle. Youve not tried to understand Brown. Your lazy."

[February 2] Vivian de St. Vrain responds:  "Whether I'm lazy or not, Brown writes in an obscure code. Why should I have to try to crack the code?  Why can't she write in English? She's a Professor of English, for goodness sake. It's not my job to figure out what she's trying to say; it's her job to make it plain."

[February 2] Sean R. Fine writes: "It makes me wonder about the "imaginary" in which Laura Brown seems to thrive. Closed, cloistered, self-congratulatory."

[February 3] Thurman Valentino (SVDGA) writes: "I think that Vivian de St. Vrain is absolutely correct not to try to figure out what that sentence means. It's not a reader's responsibility. My opinion is that Laura Brown is smart enough to produce a complicated argument, but not smart enough to make complicated argument clear."

[February 3] Michael F. Bristol writes: "Or maybe, dear Viv, you're not smart enough to figure it all out."

[February 4] Vivian de St. Vrain replies: "OK, Bristol, if you're so smart why don't you just tell us exactly what "persistent repetition of irresistible succession" means."  

[February 4] J C Occhiogrosso suggests: "One thing regularly follows another?"

[February 7] Beulah Withee writes:  "The problem is not with just that one sentence. It's that whole paragraphs and pages are filled with such difficult sentences. After each of these, a reader has to pause and interpret before going on to the next one. It puts far too much burden on the reader." 

[February 9] Gabriel Cussen III writes: "I tried to read the book but I didn't get very far. Do visitors to this blog remember the criticism of academic articles and books: "What is new is not true and what is true is not new." This book is even worse, because what's true is utterly trivial."

[February 9] Bernhard Starr responds: "Gabriel Cussen, I agree with you.  There's no there there."

[February 13]. Herbert Lecovin (Cornell '61) writes: "The important question is what is going on in her classroom. Does she lecture in this dialect and does she expect her students to write as she does?

Mary Antin, The Promised Land (1911)

I have just read Mary Antin's autobiography, The Promised Land, first published in 1911. It is a book that I should have known much earlier in my life but only discovered a week or so ago. The larger part The Promised Land is the familiar story of immigrant life in a new country -- the author's struggles to adapt to an unfamiliar culture, her achievements and triumphs, and her unabashed flag-waving patriotism. More strange and more informative, is the picture of life "old country," as viewed through the eyes of a young woman.  Antin grew up in provincial, impoverished Polotzk, a small city now in Belarus, but which at various times has been administered and exploited by the ungentle hands of Varangians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Germans. During Antin's youth (she was born in 1881), Polotsk was a part of Russia. It was not a good time to be a Jew in Polotsk or indeed anywhere within the Pale of Settlement. (Her story is especially pertinent because I myself have a hunk of Belarusian-Jewish genes -- as do, therefore, my children and grandchildren.) 

Antin's life in that bleak part of the world was, I think, triply suppressed. In political freedom and standard of living, by the Russians; in domestic and personal relations, by oppressive Hasidism and the rabbis who enforced its demanding rules; and thirdly, because Antin had the misfortune to be born female. She had every reason to leave Polotsk behind.   

Antin recognized early that she was a "prisoner" because "the Czar" commanded Jews to stay within the Pale. She "accepted ill usage from the Gentiles as one accepts the weather. The world was made in a certain way and I had to live in it." Polotsk was a place of constant ethnic strife fueled by dangerous superstitions. "The Gentiles said that we had killed their god and that we used the blood of murdered Christian children in the Passover." The Jewish community of Polotsk was always under threat of violence -- "the peasants would fill themselves with vodka, and set out to kill Jews. They attacked with knives and clubs and scythes and axes, killed them or tortured them, and burned their houses. This was called a pogrom." There was also the threat of the draft, where recruits served until the age of 41. (My maternal grandfather, Joseph (Usilewski) Green told me that he had been drafted into the Russian army for a twenty-year term; I now understand that he must have entered the army at age 21. In 1904 Grandpa, age 26, deserted and came to America. Good move.) Some men escaped the draft by paying crippling bribes to conscription officers. Taxation was onerous. "Peace cost so much a year in Polotsk."

Antin also explains that as stifling as was the Czar, the rules of religion were harsher. "Within the wall raised by the vigilance of the police, another wall, higher, thicker, more impenetrable was the religion of  the Jews." The rabbis favored piety (as they conceived it) to independence or freedom or prosperity and they enforced the most minute regulations and prohibitions of all actions day and night. Antin tells of a wife who found a blemish on the chicken she was preparing to cook. She consulted the rabbi who pronounced the chicken traif. That night, the family went hungry.

Polotsk seems to have had no dissenters or freethinkers, or at least none that Antin notes. I imagine that those who challenged orthodoxy either left of their own accord or were shunned.

Girls were offered little outside the family kitchen or nursery.  They were expected to marry young and produce many children, especially sons who could distinguish the family with their Torah studies. Schooling was discouraged for girls, who were taught to pronounce but not understand Hebrew. 

At its prime, Polotsk had 60,000 inhabitants, perhaps 60 per cent of whom were Jewish. There were twenty-three synagogues. Today there are no synagogues and no Jews.

Written for Descendants of Sonia and Joseph Green

This is a picture of my maternal grandparents, my mother's parents, Sonia and Joseph Green. I imagine that it was the work of a professional photographer. I guess that the image dates from when he was about thirty years old and she twenty-five -- so 1910 or thereabouts. I have no idea why the photograph has faded to blue-purple; it used to be ordinary black-and-white. I believe that the costumes that the formal young couple wear were hired for the occasion, as was the habit in those days; I doubt that their wallets would have permitted such fashionable dress.

They're a handsome young couple, are they not?  She very feminine, even delicate, prominently displaying her wedding ring; he sporting a slightly rakish mustache and a full head of youthful hair. When I knew him, forty years later, his hair was white and very sparse.

Sonia Chafetz and Joseph Usilewski arrived at Ellis Island in August of 1904, traveling steerage from Rotterdam. I've written about my grandmother Sonia here. 

I know very little about my grandfather, Joseph Usilewski, later Green. I was thirteen when he died, in 1952, from the last of his five heart attacks. Although my grandparents lived just around the corner on Coney Island Avenue, and I found myself in their presence very often, we had little to say to each other -- mostly because I spoke only English and his English was halting at best. We sometimes played 500 rummy and fan-tan, and I can remember him saying, "Now I'm in a predicament" before discarding, but that's about the most intimate we became. He was aloof and unsmiling --not in any sense "fun." But why should he be? His life had not been easy. He was from Minsk in present-day Belarus and was trained to be a pharmacist, but he had been drafted into the Russian army for the usual twenty-year term. His pay, he told me, was "a ruble every other month, when we got it." So he did the sensible thing -- deserted and ran off to America with Sonia. The family story, which I heard from my mother, was that both Joseph and Sonia were engaged to other people when they met and eloped. My mother also said that when they arrived New York they had just one pair of shoes between them and that Sonia would wait at home until Joseph came home from work before she could leave the house. My mother also told me that when she herself was born (June 14, 1905), her father was not allowed to visit Sonia in the hospital because he could not prove that he was her husband (no ring, no papers). Whether my grandparents were ever legally married, I do not know; nor does it matter.  

My grandfather was a strict father; my mother said that he raised his children "with the belt." There was a two-year period when he wouldn't speak to my then young-adult mother because he disapproved of her male friendships.

I don't think his was a happy marriage; he was frequently absent and it has been supposed that there were "other women" in his life. Nor was he a great success in the new continent; he never found a home in the world of business although as far as I know he was always employed and never in debt. In his last years he worked as a messenger carrying papers and money from one downtown business to another. When I knew him, he and Sonia lived in a very modest two-room apartment (in a third-floor "walkup").  

I suppose I should mention that although born Jewish, neither Joseph nor Sonia practiced their religion. Neither of them ever attended a synagogue or even honored Rosh Hashanah or Pesach at home. Joseph was a socialist and an active member of the Workmen's Circle, in his day a mutual aid society for recent immigrants. I know nothing of his political commitments except that he had a deep loathing for the communist government of Russia. "Worse than the czars."

Joseph had a brother, Nahum, and a sister whose name I have forgotten. Neither of his siblings had children.

If I had been more enterprising, I might have learned from Joseph and his family what life was like in White Russia in the nineteenth century. But I was too young, too self-centered. Too bad.

Starokonstantinov

Ukraine has been invaded and whole cities have been obliterated by the Putin dictatorship. It's tragic. Once again, I'm overwhelmingly grateful that my grandparents chose to pack up and leave the blighted Ukraine. It's a decision that has looked better and better with each passing year.  

My father's family came from a Ukrainian "shtetl" called Starokonstantinov, or Alt Konstantin ("old Constantine"). As a youth, I overheard but did not understand conversations in Yiddish about a place that my grandparents called (phonetically) Xusantine-gebernia, where the X stands for a non-English deep guttural fricative. Seventy years ago I paid little attention to my eastern European ancestry. Now I'm fascinated.

Where is Starokonstantinov?  What is a "shtetl?"

I've just read Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern's new (2014) and highly pertinent history, The Golden Age Shtetl (an oxymoronic title if there ever was one). Y P-S defines a shtetl as "an East European market town in private possession of a Polish magnate, inhabited mostly but not exclusively by Jews, and subject to Russian bureaucracy." Starokonstantinov, he claims, was a "quintessential shtetl." "My" ancestral shtetl lies in the western part of Ukraine, about 50 miles south of a line drawn between Lviv and Kyiv. Nowadays, it has a population of about 30,000 souls.

I know that my grandfather's people lived in Starokonstantinov from the middle of the nineteenth century, but I have no idea when they first arrived -- it might have been years or centuries before. The town itself is not an ancient foundation. It enters history only in the late 16th century when a Polish noble named Konstanty Ostrogski built himself a castle (which still survives) and took ownership of the surrounding area. Starokonstantinov was a "private town" -- meaning that it was owned by the Ostrogski family for several hundred years. In its first years, Starokonstantinov was included in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In 1569 it became part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1793, and for many years, even after my ancestors had struck out for the new world, it was a possession of the Russian Empire. Now it's in the independent Ukraine, and hoping to remain so.

The history of Starokonstantinov is marked by a series of tragedies prior to the one now in progress. An early disaster was the Battle of Starokonstantinov in 1648, which was a key event in the Chmielnicki Massacres of 1648-49. Eastern rite Cossacks broke into the fortified town and killed all of its 130 Jewish families and as many Polish Roman Catholics as they could find. During the early part of the 18th century, the Haidamack massacre of Uman by Cossacks spilled over into other Ukrainian shtetls, including "mine." And then beginning in 1881 came the series of pogroms -- anti-Jewish peasant riots provoked and tacitly supported by the Russian officialdom. In Starokonstantinov, there were 6611 Jews in 1847 and 9212 (61% of the total population) in 1897. (There would have been two more if my grandparents hadn't seen the light in 1895). During the Nazi occupation in 1942, virtually all the remaining Jewish population (6731 in 1939) was murdered. It's a troubled, tragic history.

I'm not sure what it means to say that a town was wholly owned by Polish nobility. Did the Ostrogskis own all the land, or the land and some of the buildings? Did they administer the public works? The churches? Did they possess the surrounding farms?  Did they own, until they were freed in 1861, the serfs?  Most likely, each shtetl had its own particular form of ownership (the late medieval world was anything but standardized). Y P-S does not explain; perhaps he assumes it's common knowledge.

Starokonstantinov occasionally makes an appearance in The Golden Age Shtetl.

I had not realized how active my ancestors might have been in the vodka trade. "In Starokonstantinov, the possession of Countess Rzewuska, about fifty [Jewish-owned] inns and taverns yielded 67 percent of the town revenues." (Query: how and when did the shtetl pass from the Ostrogskis to the Rzewuskis, who were a very prominent and wealthy Polish family)? As far as I can tell, the "town revenues" went directly into the hands of the Polish overlords. In 1827, "Starokonstantinov Jews realized the that their efforts to prevent the draft of men for twenty to twenty five year terms in the Russian army [had failed], and the Jewish populace turned against their own kahal elders and attacked their houses." "Local police had to summon an additional army unit to suppress the outburst." (The "kahal" was a committee of prominent Jewish citizens who were the nominal governors [under Polish supervision] of the Jewish population.) In the first half of the nineteenth century, the divorce rate among Jewish couples in Starokonstantinov, was 16 percent. In larger cities, it was even higher (in Letichev it was 47 percent). Y P-S attributes the surprisingly high rate of failed marriages to the relative freedom of Jewish women and to the breakdown of traditional constraints as the Jewish population became increasingly urbanized. A major fire in Starokonstantinov in 1835 hastened the shtetl's decline. Russian travelers found Starokonstantinov and especially its roads deplorable. "A Russian army officer observed that Starokonstantinov is dirty beyond any measure: but 'if we bother ourselves to learn the reasons for this situation, we would perhaps find out that even the Jews, whom are usually blamed, have nothing to do with it.... To drive through the streets of the town is a real challenge, as there is no pavement. Stones once paving the road have long sunk into the soils. When it is raining, they do nothing but prevent movement.'" Mud season in Starokonstantinov must have been an annual challenge. Nevertheless, Starokonstantinovites were readers: a merchant estimated that in the shtetl there were "about 20,000 books, mostly prayer books, bible and bible commentaries, tractates on the Talmud and the Kabbalah." Y P-S thinks that this number must be a great exaggeration. But it's on the record that a merchant named Pinhas Yosef Bromberg from Starokonstantinov brought twenty Hebrew books with him while traveling on business to St Petersburg. 

My great-grandfather was a participant in the commerce of Starokonstantinov. According to my father, he was a "factor."  A "faktor" (Yiddish from German) was essentially a middleman. My ancestor had a horse and a wagon (perhaps, I allow myself to fantasize in a moment of self-aggrandizement, two horses and two wagons). According to tradition, he mostly dealt in grain, but factors such as he bought and sold whatever was available: wood, coal, ribbons, calico, mirrors, bolts and screws, vodka and wine. They did much of their business at fairs and Starokonstantinov was famous for its very prominent fair.

E & L Chafetz Family Circle c. 1946-1952

When I was a boy in the 1940s and '50s, I was -- yearly or semi-yearly -- hauled off to gatherings of the E & L Chafetz Family Circle. "Chafetz" was the maiden name of my maternal grandmother, Sonia Green. "E" and "L" were Sonia's parents, but the names that the initials abbreviated are gone for good. At the Family Circle, twenty or thirty or sometimes even forty Chafetz siblings, cousins, and spouses would share snacks, schnapps, and gossip. No question but that, selfish and un-empathetic lad that I was, I very much resented being scrubbed and fancied up to attend these meetings -- especially on a summer Sunday afternoon when the Brooklyn Dodgers might be playing a double-header. Why would a young scamp want to miss out on Red Barber and Connie Desmond in order to hang from a subway strap for an hour and a half while the stifling IRT rattled to some obscure corner of the Bronx -- just to while away the afternoon with a bunch of old folks?

The Chafetz relatives were all immigrants from Belarus and thereabouts, born, like my grandparents, in the 1870s or 1880s. They were small people -- tiny really -- the men topping out at or 5'3" or  5'4", the women at 5'0" or somewhat less -- their stature a consequence of their impoverished "old country" childhoods. They spoke Yiddish or Russian to each other and very rudimentary English to me. They smelled peculiarly -- of chicken soup overlaid with moth balls, their "good clothes" having been retrieved from the storage closet for this annual adventure. They assembled, if I remember correctly, at the second-floor apartment over someone's store. (It seemed as though they were all keepers of small shops -- newspaper kiosks or vegetable markets or candy stores or perhaps a delicatessen or an "appetizer." One enterprising Chafetz cousin was a glazier.) They seemed to be mostly childless -- or, at least I can't remember encountering any other youths at these events.

Who were these people? Why were they so asymmetrical? Bent and twisted, most of them, their faces marred by blackheads and lumps and swellings. Their mouths were dental nightmares. Must I admit that my ten-year-old self was repelled and disgusted, unconscious that their distorted bodies were a testament to their arduous troubled lives?

Who was Uncle Joe Pessin? How was he related to me? What was his livelihood? I remember only a small dark bald man with a grating voice. Did he have a family?  And who were indistinguishable Lifscha and Leah? Were they twins or sisters or sisters-in-law? Why did Uncle Usher smell so pungently? Was he in the pickle or sauerkraut business? I know only that he had a great expanse of face and outsized shoulders and that he longed to visit his brothers and sisters in Winnipeg. 

At these gatherings, I was put on display. My mother (my father refused to attend) would take me around the room and introduce me to the various cousins and uncles and aunts. It was a torment, frankly. "This is your uncle Nahum." Uncle Nahum would shake my hand. I had nothing to say to him, but Uncle Nahum asked the question that was every uncle's question. "How are you doing? You doing well in school?"  "Yes, I'm doing well in school." And so this uncle would smile beneficently upon me. And then on to the next one. 

Because of what I perceived as their limited communication skills (though English might have been Uncle Nahum's fourth or fifth language), I definitely felt superior and condescending -- an acute embarrassment to me now. In my heart, I silently patronized these strange people.

What I didn't know, and is so obvious now, was that I was much more important to them than they were to me. That I was "doing well in school" were words that they dearly wanted to hear. It was for my generation and for me that they had braved the Cossacks, sold the farm, deserted from the Russian army, left backward Belarus or Ukraine behind, endured the miseries of steerage, slept four to a bed for years and half-acclimated themselves to a new world utterly foreign to them. For me. They had sacrificed themselves to invest in me. So that I could "do well in school," go to college, live a better life. I was their emissary to America, to the future.

What could a ten-year-old have possibly known?  It's too late to regret that I didn't learn their language and learn their stories. That world of theirs, that universe represented by E and L Chafetz --- it's all gone now, vanished, present no where else but in my failing memory. 

More About My Father

My father had many admirable traits. He was absolutely honest -- "honest to a fault" even. He had a fine sense of humor. He was compassionate and though he affected stoicism, he was deeply romantic and emotional -- tears came easy to him. He was a self-effacing but diligent worker. He was a fine, graceful athlete -- basketball, tennis, baseball (a catcher!) His social views were progressive. I never detected a jot or tittle of bigotry in his conversation (in fact, words that denigrated racial or religious groups were unknown in our home. When I heard words like "goy" on the street, I had to do some research to find out what was meant.) He was a thoughtful man, a wise man, a realist and not an ideologue. He was an affectionate father and husband. He never provoked a soul and had no enemies. He enjoyed his life.

I profited immensely from observing these excellent traits in action.

But perhaps because of his impoverished first-generation beginnings, he was never at ease in the world. Yes, he was comfortable at home and in his backyard garden and among his circle of friends, many of whom he had known from childhood. He was comfortable walking to the BMT at Newkirk Plaza, taking the subway to Court Street in downtown Brooklyn, and practicing his profession, where he was much respected. But he did not like to step out of his milieu. He couldn't fend for himself. Here's an extreme but telling example: one day, when I was ten or so years old, as we were walking home, probably from the schoolyard, he stopped in front of the local A & P and said to me, "Your mother wants a quart of milk; you go in and buy the milk. I'll wait outside." Which I did, of course; I was used to running such errands. My father couldn't go into a market without stress. He could buy a newspaper at a candy store or kiosk, and he could bring home a loaf of rye bread from Ebinger's bakery, but I never once saw him in a vegetable market or a fish store or a butcher shop. When my mother died in 1978, he had to hire people to shop for him. And someone to cook, because, as the saying goes, he couldn't boil water. Because of his discomfort when out of his routine, he was a classic stick-in-the-mud. He couldn't travel. He never learned to drive a car. In his relations with others, he was totally passive. He allowed my mother to organize his social life and after she died, he became completely isolated. He hated change. Once when I visited him late in his life, when he was in serious arthritic pain, he complained about the station to which his radio was tuned. It was one of those "twenty-four hours of news" stations that repeated itself every few minutes. I said, "Why not change the station?" He said, "Aw, it's already set there." 

I tried very hard not to imitate these less-than-admirable habits. 

Written for My Grandchildren; Your Great-Grandmother, Lillian Green

My mother, your great-grandmother, Lillian Green, was born in New York City, probably in Harlem, on June 9, 1905.

Her parents, Sonia Chafetz and Joseph Usilewski, were part of the great migration to America of Eastern European Jews. According to my mother, Sonia and Joseph were both engaged to other people when they eloped, he deserting from the Russian army. They arrived at Ellis Island mid-August of 1904 without a kopeck in their pockets and only one pair of shoes between them. I used to think that my mother had been conceived aboard the ship from Rotterdam, but the dates don't bear it out. Moreover, It's a melancholy fact that passengers in steerage were segregated by sex and kept apart. 

My mother was born Lilly Usilewski but when she entered public school, which is where she acquired English, she was enrolled as Lily Solawisky. When her younger brother was enrolled as Daniel Oslofsky, my grandfather Joseph realized that it was time to Americanize his name. The judge before whom he appeared was named Green, so Green he became. Lilly became Lillian when she married, my father insisting that "Lilly's not a name." He and everyone called her "Lil" but she was always "Lilly" to her mother Sonia.

Lil's upbringing, I am afraid, was impoverished and harsh. I was told that her father raised her and her younger brothers Dan and Ellis (Bub) "with the belt." Her mother Sonia was chronically ill from goiter and from the consequences of her five home-made abortions, so against her wishes Lil was taken out of school six weeks into high school to run the house and to raise her brothers, a sacrifice for which she received no appreciation either from them or from her father. For her, it was a disaster and a source of bitterness.. Her life from age thirteen to age twenty-six, when she married my father, Emanuel, is almost entirely blank to me. I know that she worked in the printing industry and was a skilled proofreader. She was not at all athletic or artistic but she was musical -- she played the piano and sang. At some point in early adulthood she started to take vacations at one of those camps for young Jewish adults in the Catskills. She sang in camp musicals and it was there that she met my father, a law clerk studying for the bar. My grandfather Joseph Green disapproved of her independence and refused to speak to her for two years -- a wound from which she was still suffering when I came to know her. Lil and Manny were married on June 19, 1930 and had four children:  Eugene (1935- 2006), Susan (1937-1938), Elihu (1939 -    ), and Jonathan (1942 -    ).

Her hard early life and the death of her daughter at the age of nine months, along with a chronic, agonizing stomach ulcer left her a troubled woman. She was what used to be called "difficult" -- acerbic, rude, insensitive, thoughtless. She once said to me, "I was a good mother until you boys were six years old; after that, I couldn't cope." I think it was honest and insightful of her to say so. Yet my very earliest memories are pleasurable. She kept us warm and fed and loved; otherwise I don't know how my brothers and I would have been able to have lived satisfying lives. But I also know that I have no memories of touching her or being touched by her, although sometimes she would demand a quick peck on the cheek. She was not at all "supportive" -- "assaultive" would be a better term. There was no praise, only incomprehension or disdain.

I can't remember any particular words that she said to me, but here's a sample of her language. I remember that when my two or three month old firstborn suffered noisily from colic, she proposed to my wife, "Maybe your milk is poisoning him"  -- which not a sentiment likely to endear her to a struggling new mother.

It took me into adulthood to recognize that my mother's peculiarities were not villainy but the product of her emotionally impoverished early years and of her almost constant pain. 

After her children were grown, she resumed her piano playing and turned herself into a stalwart of the League of Women Voters. In 1960, during JFK's presidential campaign, she gathered fifty or sixty women and welcomed Eleanor Roosevelt herself to our home on East 9 Street. A most memorable and important contribution.

She did not mellow with age. Yet I would have to say, that all things considered, she did well.

Lil died at age 74 from the consequences of her then-incurable ulcer. In the hospital, dying, "intubated" and incapable of speech, she scribbled on a scrap of paper, "I love you all,"  and I know that she meant sincerely what had always been so difficult for her to express. I retain that piece of paper as a relic. 

Here's a picture of Lil at her best. Me and my mom, c. 1940.

For My Grandchildren: Your Great Grandmother and her Siblings

Dear Talia, Oliver, Ella, Lola, Luke, Caleb, and Asher: 

Here's a picture of your great grandmother, Anne Krull Goss (1912-2009) with her siblings.

Anne is the pretty young blonde woman, second from the left. She's the oldest.

The picture was taken during the World War II years, '42 or '43. On great grandma's right is her brother Jack, whose tank was hit by cannon fire. He was the only survivor of his crew and spent many months recuperating in an army hospital. On her left is Hy, who was exempted from service, if I remember correctly, because his business was declared an essential industry. On Hy's left is your great-great aunt Frieda. Frieda's fiance (a soldier who was named Aubrey, but I don't know anything else about him) was killed in Europe. On Frieda's left is Mendy, the youngest, who was a bombardier on a B-24.

The war disrupted many lives, not only those who served but those who stayed at home.   

I've been lucky -- too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam. I hope you are similarly lucky.  Better than that --  I hope these endless wars in which we're engaged (in Afghanistan and Syria right now) come to an end.

Grandma Anne contributed 1/8 of your genetic inheritance. The people depicted here might seem to come from the remote past, but be aware that they're in you, part of you. 

Cousins

Hey there, internet pilgrims, searchers, wanderers who might be googling their own name or a relative's.  All of the following people are cousins of each other, cousins of mine. If  you find yourself here, identify yourself on the comments page, and I'll tell you how I think you are related. Hint: you're all descended from Lebe Hessel (d.1910) and Tsina Voloshen (b.1854).

Talia Soglin, Oliver Soglin, Ella Pearlman-Chang, Lola Pearlman-Chang, Luke Pearlman, Caleb Pearlman, Asher Pearlman, Hannah Kaplan, Josiah Kaplan, Leslie Pearlman, Matthew Pearlman, Nancy Groce, Nora Groce, Susan Groce, Paul Pearlman, Ruth Pearlman, Owen Pearlman, Clara Pearlman, Karen Hessel, Dana Hessel, Alexander McCarthy-Hessel, Jane McCarthy Hessel, Deborah Hessel, Haley Roher, Jenny Roher,  Michael Hessel, Victoria Hessel, Mark Hessel, Andrea Hessel, Laurie Pearlstein, Jason Schoolsky, Rebecca Schoolsky, Allyson Schoolsky, Barry Pearlstein, Mitchell Pearlstein, Hunter Pearlstein, Remi Pearlstein, Holly Cooper, Alec Cooper, Elizabeth Cohen, Mateo Davis, Connor Davis, Christopher Cohen, Jonathan Cohen, David Cohen, David Markson, Aubrey Peluso, Samuel Markson, Zachary Markson, Nicholas Markson, Madeleine Markson, Wendy Markson, Charlotte Riley, Joelle Riley, Zoe Riley, Samuel Riley, Steven Gross, Ellen Gross, Edward Cohen, Terry Cohen, Joseph Cohen, Charles Cohen, Mahala Cohen, Judith Cimochowski, Alexander Cimochowski, Erica Cimochowski, Alexander Cimochowski, Lawrence Baizer, Judith Baizer, Sarah Baizer, Tessa Baizer, Barbara Pearlman, Rachel Wells, Andrew Wells, Steven Pearlman, Samuel Pearlman, Maya Terry, Nathaniel Pearlman, Benjamin Hessel Pearlman, Eve Pearlman, Nicholas Cohen, Mollie Liliana Sand, Adaline Sand, Jay Sand, Marc Sand, Daniel Cohen, Jonathan Cohen, Solomon Cohen, Emmanuelle Cohen, Abigail Cohen, Ella Cohen, Phoebe Cohen, Hannah Cohen, Ayanna Gould, Aiden Gould, Cole Pearlman, Reese Pearlman.

There will be many errors and many omissions here.  Tell me. 

For My Grandchildren: Anne Goss

Dear T, O, E, L, L, C, A:  This is about your great-grandmother, Anne Goss. She was born Hannah Sarah Krull in 1912 in New Jersey, but I've forgotten which city, although I know that as a young person she lived in Bayonne, Hackensack and Paterson. Her parents, David and Katherine Meltzer Krull, were recent immigrants from eastern Europe. She was the oldest of five siblings: Anne, Jacob (Jack), Hyman, Freda, and Max (Mendy). Her father installed metal ceilings, her mother was what was then called a "practical" (i.e. unlicensed) nurse. The family was not wealthy. The five children shared two beds, boys in one, girls in the other, sleeping crosswise. Anne had a bout of polio at sixteen months which left her with a permanent limp and weakness in the left side of her body. Because of the effects of the illness, she endured an unusually difficult childhood -- marked by a series of surgeries on her leg which may or may not have helped. But she was quick-witted and talented, learning to play violin and viola and graduating as high school valedictorian. About the Jewish religion, important to her parents, she told me, "I gave up that stuff when I was thirteen." She was intent on a college education which her parents opposed because the few dollars that she made as a dental assistant were crucial to the family economy. She won a full scholarship to Barnard College but it's sad to report that when she arrived on the first day of classes she discovered that she had to pay for room and board, which her family could not afford. She returned home but was admitted to Montclair State Teacher's College where she majored in chemistry. In a world with more advantages he would have gone on to medical school and become a distinguished physician, but such a career was not in the cards. At Montclair she played string quartets and met your great grandfather, Daniel Goss. There wasn't enough money to allow them to marry and no one lived together before marriage in those days. Anne once told me that the greatest mistake of her life was that she didn't go to bed with Dan until after they married, which didn't happen until he was 26 and she was 24. I think those premarital depression years must  have been hard and unsatisfying. And even after they married, still not so good because Dan and Anne couldn't afford a place of their own but shared an apartment with his parents (actually shared a bedroom, with a curtain between the parents'  bed and theirs). Dan's parents disapproved of Anne: "Why would you want to marry a cripple?" Eventually Dan was hired as a teacher of mathematics at Paterson High School and then in 1946 moved to Utica College in Utica, New York. Although Ann had been told that the polio made it impossible for her to carry a child, she gave birth to three daughters (Althea -- your grandmother --in 1939; Phyllis in 1942, and Paula in 1951). She taught mathematics until she retired at the then-mandatory age of 65 but continued with her tutoring business through her seventies. Meanwhile, she had mastered the domestic arts: cooking, baking, sewing (she made all her daughters'  clothes through their childhoods) and knitting. She was a hard-working woman, often to be found knitting, reading a book, and watching TV at the same time. Dan died in 1966 and so she spent many more years as widow than as a wife. Her life was filled with pain (two dozen major surgeries) but she never complained. She was independent, frugal, and adventurous. She was also strict, cool, not at all affectionate, and humorless. Not exactly humorless -- she never laughed, that I can remember, but sometimes she would respond to a joke by saying, "That's funny."  She played bridge to win and not for fun and she liked a rough game of Scrabble with her grandsons. She was easy to respect but difficult to love.

She moved to Boulder at age 87 and lived to be 97, though much impaired. At her 90th birthday party, in 2002,  she was still functioning well but "looping."  If she had died at 90 she would not have missed much. She was demented and bedridden for the last few years of her life. The last coherent statement she made to me, in her last month, was "I'm not afraid of this dying business."  

A good memory: Anne spent most of her early life wearing a heavy metal brace on her bad leg. But when she was in her early 90s, she acquired a brace made of a light space-age material. I took her walking in the mountains. First time. She was thrilled.

Here's another: she liked to help grade Althea's math exams and she liked to talk calculus with her grandsons. I remember saying to them, "You have to understand something. This is unusual. Your standard run-of-the-mill grandmother does not understand calculus."

More Genealogical Information for my Grandchildren

Dear Asher, Caleb, Luke, Lola, Ella, Oliver, Talia:

These are pictures of your great-great-great-grandparents, Leib or Louis Hessel and Tsina Voloshen Hessel. They are the parents of Eta or Yetta Hessel, who married Isaiah Pearlman, your great-great grandfather, in StaryConstantine, Ukraine, sometime around 1895. I knew Eta, who died in 1962 when I was in my early 'twenties, although our conversations were limited because we did not share a common language.  According to my father, these pictures are copies of drawings executed by an itinerant Ukrainian artist. Drawn when? Perhaps 1870 or thereabouts.

I don't know much about these people. I have no idea what they did for a living or how long they lived. I see some family resemblance in Leib's small black eyes and abbreviated eyebrows, but otherwise, not much. What sort of hat is he wearing? Is Tsina wearing the wig of the orthodox or is that her real hair? 

He looks mild.  She looks determined.

I know that my grandmother Eta had a number of siblings. In my father's handwriting, I have a document that hints of two of them: a brother, Morris Hessel, who married Mary Greenberg and had a son, Paul and a grandson Merel;  and then a sister Malka, who married one Joseph Cohen and had a son, Saris, who was a high school principal in New York, and had a son Peter Cohen, a physician based in Denver. I wonder why my father kept so aloof from his aunts and uncles and cousins? Was there a story? They were not at all a part of our life. No visits, no family celebrations, nothing.

I once met my father's "Aunt Mary," who sold tickets at the Kent Theater on Coney Island Avenue. it must have been the only time I went to a movie with my father; he said, "This is my Aunt Mary."  I was perhaps 8 years old, and uncurious. That's the end of the story. I wish I had more to tell you. 

More Genealogy Written for my Grandchildren

Dear grandchildren:

I once asked my father, your great-grandfather Emanuel Pearlman, where in the Ukraine we originated. He said that he was told that it was a village called (and here he used a very deep guttural initial consonant) Xhosantin-gebernya  -- an answer that left me not much enlightened. If he knew more -- and I don't think he did -- he didn't say. Our family did not cultivate nostalgia for the old country. Nor much curiosity either. We had no reason to yearn.

But new information about our past has recently come to me. According to a correspondence between my late cousin Marion and a distant Israeli relative, it is now clear that our family hails from the the town of StaryConstantine -- also called Starokostiantiyniv in Ukrainian and Alt Konstantine in Yiddish. It was a small city of perhaps 30,000 people at its height, founded, as far as wikipedia and I can figure, in the sixteenth century by a noble or wealthy person named Konstanty Ostrogski who built himself a castle sometime during the 1560s. Castles are built for protection in lawless places, but then, most places were lawless in late medieval Europe. Old Constantine is in northern Ukraine at the junction of the Ikopot and Sluch rivers. Here's a picture of the Old Constantine castle across from the Sluch:   

 

 

But when, you ask, did your and my ancestors settle in Old Constantine?  I remember it mentioned when I was a child that our family came to the Ukraine from "the west", which I assumed to be Germany because my grandmother Eta's maiden name was Hessel (though in fact Hessel is more commonly Danish rather than German). The Jewish community in Old Constantine dates to the sixteenth century, it is reported. "The town’s Jews suffered Cossack onslaughts during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the end of the nineteenth century, more than half of the town’s population was Jewish." That's all we know.

However, in the nineteenth century, there lived in Old Constantine a husband and wife named Yaakov and Menucha Sheindl Perelman. They dwelt in a house on the corner of Ragnedinshkaya and Bolshaya Vasikovshaya streets (a house which was destroyed during the second world war). Yaakov Mikolshtein Perelman was born about 1830, lived a long life, and died in about 1920. According to the story, he resided in the one house his entire life. His wife, Menucha Sheindl came from Radomyshyl, a village not far from Old Constantine that was historically a center of Jewish settlement. (In 1797 a total of 1,424 people or 80% of the total population were Jewish). Menucha Sheindl Perelman was the daughter of a sugar and wool merchant named Solomon Rabinovich, who was so rich that "they changed houses for Passover" -- which is a custom heretofore unknown to me. Menucha died in 1908 at age 75 or thereabouts. The family, once wealthy, lost everything in the 1917 revolution and the disorder and purges that followed.  

And how are Yaakov and Menucha related to you, my grandchildren?  Well, they're your great-great-great grandparents. According to the newly discovered information, they had eighteen children "mostly twins," of whom only nine survived to adulthood. Seven daughters were born before your great-great grandfather Isaiah (also called Buzya or Buzzy) saw the light. Isaiah it is reported, was born "the year the serfs were freed," which is 1861, but I know that he was 83 when he died in 1946, so I calculate that he was born in 1863. But perhaps Isaiah didn't know his own age which wouldn't have been unusual in an era of bad record keeping. When he was thirty-five, Isaiah emigrated to America, arriving in 1896 or thereabouts.

Why did he set out for the New World?  Certainly the troubled conditions in Old Constantine were reason enough. But there's also something of a story. Isaiah married (I don't know whom) but after one night of marriage he asked for a divorce. I don't know if the divorce was granted, but I do know that very soon afterward he left town with Eta (or Yetta) Hessel, also from Old Constantine. She was 23 or 24, a decade or a dozen years younger than he. 

Why the one-day marriage?  No one knows what happened that night, but it couldn't have been good. A sexual impediment?  An arranged marriage gone bad?  Prior misdeeds come to light?  The discovery of pregnancy?  We're free to speculate, but never to know. 

However, we do know that Isaiah and his father did not see the world with the same eyes. Yaakov was religious; his son Isaiah was an atheist. We don't know Yaakov's politics, but we know that Isaiah was some sort of leftist or communist. Something of a free-thinker, after the style of Moses Mendelssohn. And perhaps Karl Marx. And we can also guess that it might have been impossible to remain in Old Constantine after the marriage contretemps. 

In New York City, Isaiah and Yetta had four children: Max, born around 1896, Solomon, born about 1898; Mollie, born in 1900; and my father Emanuel, the youngest, born on December 22, 1904.

My grandfather Isaiah also had two younger brothers. There was Chaim, who followed him to America some years later and from whose daughter Rose spring the Goldberg and Chodosh lines. And also Isaiah's youngest brother, who was named Meshulam Zusi Perelman. He did not follow his older brothers, and I don't know his history, but his family left the Ukraine and it's his Israeli granddaughter Nechama Sheindl Brukman (born Perlman) through whom these facts were recovered. Nechama Brukman died in 2008 at age 86.

It is most melancholy to read that in 1939 there were 6,743 Jews living in Old Constantine, accounting for 31 percent of the total population, and that the entire Jewish community, some no doubt our cousins, were murdered during the first years of the war.

A Letter to my Grandchildren

What was it like in the 1940s when I was your age?  Very different. Milk was delivered daily in bottles: a milk-wagon, drawn by a tired, plodding old horse, appeared on East 9th Street three times a week before we sat down to breakfast. There were also daily visits from a horse-drawn vegetable truck. An itinerant knife-sharpener came once every couple of months. And also a very old man with a large sack thrown over his back, singing out in the loudest voice I've ever heard, 'I cash clothes." There were squarish automobiles (Packards, DeSotos, Studebakers), but far fewer than today -- so few that kids would play punchball and stickball right in the middle of the street, just stepping to the side to let that occasional car whizz by. Kids also skated in the street, using clunky metal skates that attached to the shoe by turning a "skate key." There was no television, but everyone listened to the radio. "Portable" radios were as big as bread boxes. Some people had refrigerators (much smaller than modern ones), but most had "iceboxes." Every week, an ice delivery man would haul a block of ice (about a foot-and-a-half square if I remember correctly) with large tongs and set it in the icebox. Coal was delivered in barrels: men with heavy gloves would roll the barrels from the truck to the ground-level coal chute. All telephones were attached to the wall with wires. Long distance phone calls were expensive and only for emergencies. People did not communicate by e-mail or by texting, but by means of postcards and letters. A "letter" was a piece of paper on which whole paragraphs were written; it was inserted into an "envelope" and put in a "mail box" for delivery. Hard to believe, I know. There were no word processors. I learned to write using a "straight pen." There were no dvd's or cd's or streaming. Instead, we had "records," vinyl discs 12-inches in diameter which were placed on a rotating "turntable" on which rested a hand with a stylus, at first steel and then later diamond. It was primitive, I know, but it worked rather well. There were no credit cards. Some people had checking accounts, but 99% of commercial transactions were completed with "money." When I started at P. S. 217, in 1944, I wore "knickers" (pants that went to just below the knee and were held in place with elastic) and long socks. You can sometimes see knickers in old illustrated books or in clothes museums. Men always wore hats: fedoras or derbies or panamas or bowlers or pork-pies, usually made of felt. Women wore hats too, some with veils, most of them godawful ugly. Young folks "courted." In those days, before people became intimate, they would go through a period in which they would "date" and talk and get to know each other. This period could last for weeks or even months. Astonishing, I know, but trust me, it happened that way in the old days. "The past is another country; they do things differently there."      

Althea Goss Pearlman (1939-2016)

Althea Goss Pearlman, 76, of Boulder, died February 10, 2016 at AltaVita Memory Care Centre in Longmont where she had resided for the last two and a half years.  

 
Althea was born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1939 to Daniel Goss and Anne Krull Goss, both teachers of mathematics. She was raised in Utica, New York and graduated as valedictorian from Utica Free Academy in 1956. She held degrees in mathematics from Cornell University (where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa) and Harvard University. She married Elihu Hessel Pearlman, whom she had met in a first-semester chemistry class, in June, 1960.

  
Althea had many interests but her life revolved around her two passions: teaching and family. Althea taught mathematics at Ithaca High School in Ithaca, New York, at Warren Junior High School and Newton South High School in Newton, Massachusetts, at the City College, CUNY, in New York City, at Platt Junior High School in Boulder and, for twenty years, at Boulder High School. In 1991-92, she was an Einstein Congressional Fellow in Washington, D.C, serving as an advisor to the House of Representatives on mathematics teaching. She also spent four years as a Clinical Professor in the School of Education at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she acted as a mentor and coach to prospective teachers. For Althea, teaching was not a job or a profession, but a calling. She was an artist whose medium was chalk and blackboard. She accumulated a wall full of teaching awards, including, most notably, the Presidential Award for the Teaching of Science and Mathematics (1987), but was most gratified not by certificates but by appreciative letters from students whose lives she had influenced.  

Althea was an excellent and loving wife, mother, and grandmother. She is survived by her husband, with whom she enjoyed a deep, spirited, and ever-evolving love for more than half a century, by her children Nathaniel, Benjamin and Eve, by their spouses Connie Chang, Kyla Holcomb Pearlman, and Jonathan Soglin, by her seven grandchildren: Talia and Oliver Soglin of Alameda, California, Ella and Lola Pearlman-Chang of Washington DC, Luke, Caleb and Asher Pearlman of Boulder; and by her sister Paula Goss Gombas and husband Allen Gombas of Lyman, New Hampshire. Althea's sister Phyllis Goss Murray died in 1998.

   
Althea's ashes will be buried in the family cemetery in West Bradford, Vermont.  A memorial event in her honor will take place in the auditorium of Casey Middle School, 1401 High Street, on Saturday, March 5, at 3:00 P. M.

The family would like to thank the skilled and sympathetic caregivers at AltaVita and at New Century Hospice who made Althea's last years as comfortable as possible.

Should anyone wish to make a gift in Althea's honor, the family recommends the Althea Pearlman Memorial Fund at Boulder High School. Checks should be made out to Treasurer, Boulder High School (at 1604 Arapahoe Avenue, Boulder, Colorado 80302) and designated "Pearlman Memorial." A scholarship will be awarded annually to an outstanding student of mathematics. 

Sonia Green with an Addition

I published this reminiscence some years ago:

My daughter continues to urge me to write something autobiographical. To which I reply, it’s all autobiographical. But since she wants hard news, not indirect revelation, I offer this account of my grandmother, born Sonia Chafetz, later, by marriage, Sonia Usilewski and finally, after a legal name change, Sonia Green. She was born in 1884 somewhere in darkest White Russia (now called Belarus). I have no idea exactly where, but I know that she was a distinctly rural girl -- she loved to fish, to pick berries, to grow plants. Of her life in the old country, I know almost nothing -– only that she was raised in a cottage with a dirt floor and that the family brought the cow inside in the winter to keep the place warm. I know that she didn’t have a proper bed, and that at least for part of her childhood she slept on the mantle over the fireplace, which sounds mighty precarious to me. She couldn’t have had much in the way of formal education, but she did read and write Yiddish and still understood Russian in her old age. I know this because in the late 1940s or early 50s I would occasionally sit with her and listen to the broadcast of debates at the United Nations (in those days there were subsequent rather than simultaneous translations) and she would render the Russian to me, as best she could in her halting English. She never did become fluent in the only language I knew so our conversations were stilted and confined to utilitarian topics. When she was young--I’ve seen the pictures—she was dark, attractive, and voluptuous. By the time I came to know her, when she was close to sixty, her looks were long gone and she was disfigured by goiter and other diseases and no doubt by the consequences of her many self-induced abortions.  The family story was that both she and Joseph were engaged to other people when they eloped to America (my grandfather deserting from the Russian army, where he had been drafted for the usual twenty-year term, and where his salary was a ruble every other month). They arrived in New York in August of 1904 from Rotterdam. How they found their way from Minsk to Rotterdam I was never told, but the Ellis Island records report that they came through London. My mother was born in June of the following year, or just about ten months after her parents arrived in this country. My mother’s story was that at first her parents had only one pair of shoes between them, so that Sonia had to stay at home until Joseph returned from work. The family settled in Harlem; my grandfather, who was urban and more sophisticated than Sonia, had been trained as a pharmacist, but never found work in his field in the new world. I don’t know what they did for a living (was he some sort of salesman?) except that for a short time my grandparents owned a delicatessen at the corner of 4^th and 10^th streets in Greenwich Village. I’ve gone to that corner many times and tried imagine such a restaurant, but of course not a clue remains. As far as I can guess, their marriage was uneasy. My grandfather was frequently absent (my father once darkly hinted, “I don’t know whether it was other women, or what”) and my grandmother frequently ill. My father also told me that when he and mom married, he laid down a prohibition—it was in the days when men made prohibitions-- that she wasn’t to act as intermediary between Sonia and Joseph any longer. I know that my mother had to leave school six weeks into the ninth grade to care for her mother and two younger brothers. But that’s about all I was told and there are no documents. I have a few memories: Sonia trying to teach me to play fan-tan and five hundred rummy -– I was as bad then as I am now at card games; Sonia planting in wooden Philadelphia cream-cheese boxes every orange or grapefruit seed that came into her house, so that her tiny apartment had the pleasant aroma of a hot-house; Sonia growing avocados in the winter but setting them in my father’s garden (just around the corner from her third-floor walk up) in the summer. And I also remember her attempt to cure my father’s sterile apple tree with an old-country remedy—rubbing the cut half of an apple on the trunk in midwinter. I remember also stuffed cabbage, the world's finest blintzes, and jars of apricot jam sealed with paraffin. In her last years, Sonia lived with my parents; she had her own kitchen, a room that had been remodeled from my former bedroom. She was weary of life and I suspect that she died at least in part of malnutrition. I remember also that she owned a pressed-glass ruby bowl that was always filled with hard candies. I was allowed one candy per visit. When Sonia died in 1971, she had no money and precious few possessions, but I inherited the bowl. It was pretty, and I’m sorry to say that after a few years I accidentally broke it. But it was easily replaced (it was in a popular pattern and every second-hand  store had the item for sale) and I bought one for about $25.00. Some years afterward I broke the second one and bought another, but by that time the price had gone up to $50.00. So, although my inheritance in cold cash was a negative $75, I was left with grateful appreciation and many warm memories.

Now I want to complete the story of the sterile apple tree.

My father had three fruit trees in his backyard garden on East 9 Street.  A pear tree, which produced abundant fruit but not every year (it was a Seckel, if I remember correctly, very sweet);  a peach tree, which was only occasionally fruitful, probably because it was just a bit north of its proper range;  and an apple (variety unknown) which was large and healthy, disease-free, but which for some unknown reason never produced even a single blossom, let alone an actual apple.  My grandmother Sonia Green explained to my father that when they had a sterile apple in the old country, they would take a ripe apple, cut it in half, and rub it on the trunk of the tree in mid-winter.  It always worked, claimed grandma.  My father would have none of it.  "None of your superstition here," proclaimed. But one January he caught grandma apple in hand applying the folk remedy.  He didn't say anything, but the next summer, he bought some apples and tied them to the branches of the tree and took grandma to view them. She was an intelligent old lady who immediately saw through the plot --but we all had a good laugh and a good story to tell.

Where Sonia Slept

In 1904, at the age of 20, my grandmother Sonia Chafetz Uzilewski (later Green) disembarked at Ellis Island. Because of her age, and because she lived within an immigrant community, she never acquired much English, and as a result my conversations with her were strictly utilitarian. I was curious about the old country (White Russia, now Belarus) but she spoke little about it and what she did say was difficult for me to construe. Two pieces of information about her childhood have stayed with me: first, that in the old country, they brought the cow into the house in the winter "to keep warm" and secondly, that, as a girl, she "slept over the fireplace."

I was puzzled. All I could imagine was a house like my own pleasant childhood home, but with a cow on the carpet and a young lady perched precariously on the narrow mantle over the fireplace (if we had had a fireplace, which we didn't). Frankly, I couldn't make much sense out of her story. 

It wasn't until I happened to find myself in benighted Lithuania in 2003 that I figured out the cow-in-the-living-room puzzle. I visited one of those large open-air museums which are not uncommon in eastern Europe, in which traditional peasant dwellings, along with churches, mills, foundries, etc. have been  rescued and sprinkled around a landscape. At such sites, a very common form of low-end dwelling consists of a barn or animal shelter on the dirt ground floor, with a wooden second floor for human habitation erected just above. I believe that when grandma said that they brought the cow into the house, she meant that they stabled the cow down below, and that some of the heat from the animal disseminated into the living quarters -- as would, incidentally, some of its pungent effluvia.

So one problem was solved, but the mantle-sleeping remained a mystery. However, just this past week the New Yorker featured an essay on traditional Russian cooking in which there was a paragraph on a long-ago-and-far-away kind of stove. Here's the pertinent section.

"A traditional Russian kitchen starts with a pech, a huge brick oven with many winding vents designed to retain the heat from a wood fire. A pech was once the centerpiece of traditional peasant homes; it took up about a quarter of the available living space. It heated and ventilated the house, it dried food; children and the elderly slept on ledges built into it."

"Children and the elderly slept on ledges built into it." Mystery solved!

Sonia told me that she slept over the fire, which I interpreted as a fireplace. But I was wrong. She slept over the stove. For all I know, she might even have used the world pech, which I couldn't possibly have translated or understood.

Now I know, that like other children at the very bottom of the nineteenth-century Russian social ladder, she slept on a ledge built into a pech, with the cow lowing just a few feet below her. 

Need I mention once again how glad I am that she decided to pull up stakes and head for new world.

More on Sonia Green: here.

My Mysterious Uncle Max

Who knows what crimes or dark deeds my black-sheep Uncle Max had committed that made made him such a pariah in our o-so-respectable family, but they must have been something awful. Although he was my father's older brother, his name was never mentioned except with embarrassment or distaste.

Inasmuch as I'm now the "patriarch," it's time to get the family stuff on the record for the benefit of the kids, the grandkids, and the extended mishpucha. So here's all I know about my mysterious uncle. Spoiler alert: it doesn't add up to villainy.

Max was the oldest of the four (Sol, Mollie, and Mannie succeeded him). He would have been born about 1895, just about the time the family escaped the Ukraine for the Lower East Side. He studied at Albany State Teachers College for a while, but I don't think he earned a degree. He lived in Paris during the 1920s and perhaps 1930s. He was invited to but did not attend my parents' wedding. He was divorced (a source of immeasurable shame in those years). My mother said, "Uncle Max is very selfish." There was something shady about the way he made his living, but I don't know the details, except that, for a while, he ghost-wrote doctoral dissertations. He lived with a woman to whom he wasn't married. He died of a heart attack during the 1950s. 

I met him three times. Once, he came to a family gathering, My father wouldn't speak to him. Another time he paid a weekday afternoon call to our East 9 Street home. I found him in the kitchen talking with my mother: "This is your Uncle Max." And then, when I was thirteen, he called and asked if he could take me to the finals of the NCAA basketball tournament at Madison Square Garden. After a lot of discussion and negotiation, I was allowed to meet him at the arena. Max was a small man, hard of hearing, and very ordinary.  He tried hard to be congenial. He told me that he had taken "Robert" as a middle name. Frankly, he seemed no more menacing or odd than any other of my uncle-ry or than other men of his generation. What else do I remember of that evening?  During the game, an errant pass hit off a player's head and bounced into the basket.

I never saw Max again.

And yet my father once confessed to me that he told Max that "if he ever did that again, I'd kill him." My father, mildest of men, threatened someone with violent death?  Because he did what?  Dad wouldn't say.

Here's a spooky story, and I'm going to tell it exactly the way it happened, no embroidery or exaggeration. On the night of my father's funeral, my brothers and I and our wives gathered around the formica kitchen table in the old house. Uncle Max's name came up. I said, "I know the name of the woman who he lived with." "What is it?"  "It's Sarah Clyne, spelled with a C and a Y." There was a Manhattan telephone book (five inches thick and at least two thousand pages). I picked up the book and it fell open. I put my finger on a name. The name was Sarah Clyne. "I said, did you see what happened?  I just opened the book at random and my finger fell on the name Sarah Clyne, Max's lady. It seems like a sign that I should call her."

But I didn't.

Here's the only picture of Max of which I have knowledge. He's with "little grandma." The picture is taken in front of 334 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.

Family Matters

Yesterday, in a long-buried collection of file folders, I found some papers of my father's that were written during those last painful years when he was a widower. Some of the pages comprise a "commonplace" book, the theme of which is, 'why am I still alive when my wife is dead?'  In addition to the lamentations, there are two anomalous paragraphs of reminiscence  -- constituting the sum of my father's known autobiographical writings. For the benefit and edification of my own children and grandchildren and family, I now put these writings on the record.

My father writes:  "My maternal grandmother was a thin, almost gaunt  woman about 5 ft 5 inches tall. Although I am sure she loved all her children & grandchildren, I cannot remember her ever showing any overt sign of affection. We children always knew when grandma was to visit us. My mother would go into a frenzy of housecleaning. All the curtains would be washed and re-hung; the kitchen floors scrubbed and the silverware washed and polished. Her [i.e. my father's grandmother's] face was unwrinkled, the skin drawn tightly. Her most dominant feature was her eyes, piercing, direct, demanding. There would be Grandma, wearing a little hat, glancing around the room while she slowly took off her gloves. If she was satisfied with what she saw, she would give a little nod as if to say, 'well done.' We would all relax."

A historical footnote:  my grandparents came to this continent in about 1895 and the events that my father remembers are all turn-of-the-century and pre-WWI.

Until I uncovered this paragraph, I thought my grandparents came to North America on their own.  I did not know that they were accompanied by this formidable great-grandmother. Although she herself was long gone when I came on the stage, I certainly encountered those piercing black eyes in other faces, my father's in particular.  I wonder why my father (who was born in 1904) never mentioned his grandmother to me -- she certainly made an impression that lasted to the end of his life. Come to think of it, why the heck was my family so entirely tight-lipped about their ancestry?

But wait.  There's more.

"My grandparents (that would be the ferocious grandmother and her equally unknown-to-me husband), had 5 children, 4 daughters and one son. There were born to their children in a space of 10 years, 18 grandchildren.  Each one of these children were delivered at home. My grandmother attended every one of these births.  About 2 weeks before the expected date of birth, my grandmother would appear wearing her little hat and gloves & carrying a small satchel; she immediately took charge of the household. The expectant mother would be freed of all household obligations."

From this evidence it would appear that in addition to his three siblings (Max, Sol, and Molly), my father had fourteen cousins on his mother's side of the family.  Why didn't I know about them?  Why did I never meet a single one? Or even hear their names?  Or the names of their progeny, if there were any?

Also in my father's hand, scribbled in a corner of the paper, is a calculation:  Mom - 4, Manya - 6, Nadya - 3, Mary - 2, Maris (or Saris, or Norris) -3.  And then the sum:  18.

So, children and children's children and collateral descendants, you now understand a piece of the family history.

And readers:  if there's anyone out there in internetland who had a strong, perhaps dictatorial great or great-great or great-great-great grandmother who came to assist at births armed with a satchel, a little hat and memorable black eyes (first name unknown but surnamed Hessel), and who knows that his or her ancestry includes a woman whose maiden name was Mary Hessel or Manya Hessel or Nadya Hessel, or if there's someone who's descended from Noris or Moris or Saris Hessel, hey, cuz, take a moment and add a comment to this entry and I'll get right back to you.   

Antimylarmonofilamentarianism

In 1895, my grandparents wisely left the abysmal, backward Ukraine and struck out for the new world. Nine years later, my father was born in a cold-water flat in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The date of his birth: December 22, 1904, exactly at the winter solstice. "And they called his name, Emanuel, God with us." If he had been born in the old country, before the Russian authorities imposed legal cognomina upon us, he would have been named Emanuel ben Isaiah--his father's name appended to his own as a patronymic.

Despite his traditional moniker and his commitment to the essence of Judaism, my father was fiercely hostile to the irrationalities of religion. His view -- and my grandfather Isaiah's even more strongly--was that for a thousand years our lineage had been kept in poverty and darkness not just by the czars but also by the rabbis. In politics, my father and grandfather began as socialists and became New Dealers; in philosophy, they rejected theological doctrine and were among the children of the enlightenment whom Moses Mendelssohn had led to the promised land of evidence and reason. I doubt that any of my ancestors knew Karl Marx's sentence that "the criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism," but they acted as if they had absorbed it from the cradle. My brothers and I were taught to resist religious exclusivity, superstition, and ceremony.   

We now have a religious controversy in our peaceful, progressive, and largely secular western town. A group of orthodox Jews have petitioned the city council for permission to construct an eruv. What is an eruv?  It’s a “symbolic boundary that allows orthodox Jews to carry things, including their own children, outside their home during the Sabbath." (Carrying is considered work, and orthodoxy's strict interpretation of religious law prohibits any sort of sabbatical labor.) A latter-day eruv is constructed out of fishing line that is strung on utility poles; curiously, it may incorporate functioning electric and telephone wires.

I know that my forbears detested eruvim and similar expressions of irrational piety. I myself am not enraged by these useless but harmless superstitions.  Constructing an eruv does not endanger our species; it's not like opposing contraception or prohibiting stem-cell research. An eruv consoles the believers and doesn't much bother the rest of us. Yet if there is a spirit in the sky, which I very much doubt, I would hope that he would not be so small-minded as to issue ukases about carrying infants on Saturdays; infants should be carried as much as they want, which is just about everywhere and always. And if any god were so narrow as to promulgate an inside/outside-the-home rule, I would hope that he would be intelligent enough not to be flummoxed by such transparent trickery as hanging mylar filament on poles.   

I have no intuitive conception of god, but I think that the orthodox trivialize our shared longing for transcendence when they sanctify such petty practices. It would be far more pious for the orthodox to take every nickel spent to appease the Ancient of Days and bestow it on a poor Jewish family from Tashkent.  If these folks can't locate eligible Jews, there are Hondurans and Sudanese a-plenty who deserve their attention. When the orthodox re-direct their enthusiasm and their resources toward truly charitable enterprises, they will honor the universal immigrant experience and they will also practice the very worthy Jewish virtue of compassion. Constructing an eruv is a foolish waste of time and fishing line.

Here's my father's view:  "It took us hundreds of years to fight our way out of the ghetto and they want to put themselves back in jail. If the rabbis had their way," he would say, "Mahler and Bernstein and Gershwin would play accordion in a klezmer band in Bialystok, Einstein would balance the books for a caftan maker in Kiev, and a hundred and fifty Jewish Nobel Prize winners would spend their days davening in some dirty dim synagogue in Vilna."

I think it’s in a Wallace Markfield novel that an old Jewish guy confronts a group of twenty-something Jewish hippies/slackers in Miami Beach. After a heated discussion, he admonishes them:  "And don't ever be ashamed that you’re Jewish. It’s enough that I’m ashamed that you’re Jewish."

Which is pretty much how I feel about the eruvistas. Well, not exactly ashamed. Embarrassed, perhaps, by their superstitious infatuation with the "dark backward and abysm of time." 

O My Papa

We've had two major snowfalls in the last week and the road crews haven't yet found their way to our street. It's a knee-deep icy mess out there. Yesterday one of my neighbors spun himself into quite a hole. He needed a push, so I went outside to help. Even with my professional-grade ice-chopper, I had to bang around for a while and the task took a lot longer than I had expected.  Eventually, I had to resort to the old towel trick to gain enough traction to release the vehicle. My neighbor said, "I'm embarrassed. You shouldn't be doing this."  Which took me aback, of course. I replied, quite spontaneously, "It's exactly what I should be doing." 

And then I recalled one of my father's maxims: "Never omit an opportunity to do a favor for a friend, and never be embarrassed to accept a favor."

The old guy did lots of favors. When someone on East 9 Street had a problem or got into a little trouble, my father acted as consigliere; as far as I know, he never took a nickel for his trouble--though occasionally someone would drop off a compensatory lasagna. In his last years, when he lived alone and his arthritis was very bad, someone mowed his lawn and someone took in his garbage cans and someone raked his leaves.

My father was the least materialistic person that I've encountered in an entire lifetime. He didn't seem to need possessions. No car, no clothes beyond the absolute minimum, no items of personal adornment. He didn't "shop." I was with him once when bought a new hat: "See this. I want another one just like it." We were in and out of the store in two minutes. 

Although he lived in a world of weasels (he was a real-estate lawyer), he was uncontaminated by what went on around him. He'd often tell me stories about the various chicaneries by which people cheated each other--and every time he would express the same astonishment at the fallibility of human nature. He knew of public officials who were on the take, but he preferred to talk about the state legislator who had a large sign on his desk that said, "NO GIFTS."

In one of our very last conversations, I asked him if he himself had ever done anything illegal. He thought for a long time. "I don't know if you'd call this exactly illegal. Do you remember the B-----s?  Rose was a widow and she was dying of cancer, but she didn't know it. She was a teacher with two young children and she had a benefit coming to her from the city. She made a very bad decision--a lump sum instead of an annuity for her children. I went to her school and substituted a new form for the one that she had filed. It was technically a violation and I could have gotten into a lot of trouble." And then he surprised me by quoting some Wordsworth--the lines from Tintern Abbey about the "best portion of a good man's life,/ His little, nameless, unremembered acts/ Of kindness and of love."

It's hard to believe that he's been dead for twenty years now. But I remember him when we come around to the winter solstice (he was born on December 22, 1904)--and he's especially real to me when a neighbor lets me help him extricate his car from a snowbank. 

Sonia Green

My daughter continues to urge me to write something autobiographical. To which I reply, it’s all autobiographical. But since she wants hard news, not indirect revelation, I offer this account of my grandmother, born Sonia Chafetz, later, by marriage, Sonia Usilewski and finally, after a legal name change, Sonia Green. She was born in 1884 somewhere in darkest White Russia (now called Belarus). I have no idea exactly where, but I know that she was a distinctly rural girl -- she loved to fish, to pick berries, to grow plants. Of her life in the old country, I know almost nothing -– only that she was raised in a cottage with a dirt floor and that the family brought the cow inside in the winter to keep the place warm. I know that she didn’t have a proper bed, and that at least for part of her childhood she slept on the mantle over the fireplace, which sounds mighty precarious to me. She couldn’t have had much in the way of formal education, but she did read and write Yiddish and still understood Russian in her old age. I know this because in the late 1940s or early 50s I would occasionally sit with her and listen to the broadcast of debates at the United Nations (in those days there were subsequent rather than simultaneous translations) and she would render the Russian to me, as best she could in her halting English. She never did become fluent in the only language I knew so our conversations were stilted and confined to utilitarian topics.

 

When she was young -- I’ve seen the pictures—she was dark, attractive, and voluptuous. By the time I came to know her, when she was close to sixty, her looks were long gone and she was disfigured by goitre and other diseases and no doubt by the consequences of her many self-induced abortions. The family story was that both she and Joseph were engaged to other people when they eloped to America (my grandfather deserting from the Russian army, where he had been drafted for the usual twenty-year term, and where his salary was a ruble every other month). They arrived in New York in August of 1904 from Rotterdam. How they found their way from Minsk to Rotterdam I was never told, but the Ellis Island records report that they came through London.

 

My mother was born in June of the following year, or just about ten months after her parents arrived in this country. My mother’s story was that at first her parents had only one pair of shoes between them, so that Sonia had to stay at home until Joseph returned from work. The family settled in Harlem; my grandfather, who was urban and more sophisticated than Sonia, had been trained as a pharmacist, but never found work in his field in the new world. I don’t know what they did for a living (was he some sort of salesman?) except that for a short time my grandparents owned a delicatessen at the corner of 4^th and 10^th streets in Greenwich Village. I’ve gone to that corner many times and tried imagine such a restaurant, but of course not a clue remains.

 

As far as I can guess, their marriage was uneasy. My grandfather was frequently absent (my father once darkly hinted, “I don’t know whether it was other women, or what”) and my grandmother frequently ill. My father also told me that when he and mom married, he laid down a prohibition — it was in the days when men made prohibitions -- that she wasn’t to act as intermediary between Sonia and Joseph any longer.

 

I know that my mother had to leave school six weeks into the ninth grade to care for her mother and two younger brothers. But that’s about all I was told and there are no documents. I have a few memories: Sonia trying to teach me to play fan-tan and five hundred rummy -– I was as bad then as I am now at card games; Sonia planting in wooden Philadelphia cream-cheese boxes every orange or grapefruit seed that came into her house, so that her tiny apartment had the pleasant aroma of a hot-house; Sonia growing avocados in the winter but setting them in my father’s garden (just around the corner from her third-floor walk-up) in the summer. And I also remember her attempt to cure my father’s sterile apple tree with an old-country remedy — rubbing the cut half of an apple on the tree trunk in midwinter. I remember also stuffed cabbage, the world's finest blintzes, and jars of apricot jam sealed with paraffin. In her last years, Sonia lived with my parents; she had her own kitchen, a room that had been remodeled from my former bedroom. She was weary of life and I suspect that she died at least in part of malnutrition. I remember also that she owned a pressed-glass ruby bowl that was always filled with hard candies. I was allowed one candy per visit.

 

When Sonia died in 1971, she had no money and precious few possessions, but I inherited the bowl. It was pretty, and I’m sorry to say that after a few years I accidentally broke it. But it was easily replaced (it was in a popular pattern and every second-hand store had the item for sale) and I bought one for about $25.00. Some years afterward I broke the second one and bought another, but by that time the price had gone up to $50.00. So, although my inheritance in cold cash was a negative $75, I was left with grateful appreciation and many warm memories.

Basketball in My LIfe

My father, who was born in 1904, was a basketball enthusiast when the game was in its infancy. He played guard on Eastern District High School's team and later played as a freshman at CCNY under legendary coach Nat Holman. But Dad came from an impoverished family and left college after one year because, he told me once, "I couldn't see how I could stay in school when my family needed so much." So while his formal education went by the wayside, he was able to make up the difference by a lifetime of reading. And although he was not a complaining sort, it was clear to me and I think to my brothers that he felt a bit grieved that his formal athletic career had been cut so short. He kept at it, though, on his own. Well into his forties, he was absent from family dinner one night a week. "Wednesdays," my mother explained, long before I could understand what the words meant, "your father goes to the gym." And Saturday mornings, in warm weather, were reserved for tennis. Dad very much wanted his three sons to carry on his athletic tradition, but I think, in retrospect, that in the long run we all disappointed him. Both my brothers were fine athletes although not big or fast enough for professional careers; I was, alack and alas, a disappointment. Dad, who had also been a semi-pro catcher in baseball, taught Gene and Jon how to throw an "inshoot" and an "outshoot," but he could not bring himself to coach me because it was obvious that with my 55 mile an hour fastball and scattershot arm, I wasn't going anywhere, pitching-wise, and although he showed me a couple of basketball moves he was, I recognize, a bit embarrassed by my want of athletic skill. (In my defense I must report that although I was more academic than athletic, I was voted "class athlete" by my P. S. 217 (8-5) eighth grade class -- a group which must have been, now that I think of it, quite a collection of klutzes). My older brother was a good enough basketball player to play for his college team for a year, and my younger brother was an outstanding sandlot all-star in baseball who once struck out Joe Torre, who, it will be remembered, finished his major league career with a .300 lifetime average. (The second time he pitched to Torre, my brother says, the future MVP hit a ball that "is still circling the earth.") I myself had the briefest career on the diamond. The pinnacle of my experience was that, once, playing second base, I turned a double play -- took the toss from the shortstop, stepped on the bag, gracefully wheeled, and pegged the ball perfectly to the first baseman. It happened once and once only, but it was glorious -- definitely a Hall of Fame moment. The peak of my basketball career occurred in the slippery court (which doubled as a dance floor) in the basement of the Flatbush Jewish Center on Coney Island Avenue and Avenue J. I was, I estimate, thirteen years old. Wearing number 3, in black and gold, I was steaming down the left side of the court on a fast break and was forced away from the basket, so instead of a layup I managed a sweeping running left-handed hook which caught nothing but net. There was modest applause. None of my teammates guessed that I had intended to bank the ball off the backboard and that it had slipped out of my hand and swished, entirely by accident. I only reveal this deep secret now, very now.  Another high point in my career: I once won a local foul shooting contest. I hit 23 of 25. One small caveat, though. The contest was conducted in the P.S. 217 schoolyard, where the baskets were, how shall I say this correctly, unsteady and soft. As a result, they were like sewers -- everything flushed. I doubt that I would have made 23 on a standard rigid rim. Nevertheless, I did win the medal and the other competitors all used the same ball and basket as I -- so, therefore, a modest triumph. And then playing basketball faded into the background, because I didn't get my growth until very late and for a while I was playing at 4' 11" or 5' 1" against hairy guys who had already reached their full mature height. But I continued to pursue my undistinguished career -- including the most competitive activity of my life -- three on three half court in the EHHS gym, one basket wins, and "winners out." And then a little intramural in Ithaca; an occasional pickup game in Cambridge. Oh, and twenty years later on, I played a bit with my own offspring, all three of whom were more athletic than I. My last pathetic hurrah (almost a decade ago, now) was being obliterated at h-o-r-s-e by my granddaughter Ella. 

Nevertheless, I retained my interest in the sport. No longer a participant, I became a serious spectator. I know enough about roundball to appreciate both player and play. For thirty years or so, I had a good seat at the home games of the CU Buffaloes -- it was high quality college basketball (although the Buffs rarely enjoyed a winning season). One source of interest and fun for me was to evaluate the talent and try to predict which of our guys (or the visitors') had the skill and size to move up to the next level. Over the years, I followed the early days of many a later NBA regular -- and even a couple of stars. I remember in particular Jay Humphries, who played four excellent seasons for CU and then averaged in double figures during an extended NBA career. Also local lad Chauncey Billups, "Mr Big Shot" himself. Andre Roberson, a terrific defender and rebounder who never lived up to his potential because he just couldn't master the corner three; Matt Bullard, a fine outside shooter; Scott Wedman; Alec Burks; Derrick White (still playing for Boston and getting better each year); and Spencer Dinwiddie, whom I didn't judge to be an NBA player but who has become a steady professional. The high point of my CU spectatorial career occurred in 2006 when the Texas Longhorns brought to our stadium a gangly teen-ager named Kevin Durant. One didn't have to be a sophisticated evaluator of talent to recognize that KD had a spectacular career ahead of him; it was grandly obvious. It took him only two years to lead the NBA in scoring. I stopped attending CU games when the athletic department, an independent entity with only a loose connection to the University, demanded that I make a donation of $400 for the privilege of purchasing season tickets. I resented the presumption, and I felt that there were many causes more worthy of my limited philanthropy than CU basketball. Although I stay away from our local Events Center, I'm still an occasional arena visitor. In fact, just last season, LERM and I bought incredibly expensive tickets to watch the Cavaliers take on the Pelicans at the Smoothie King Arena in New Orleans. The venue was up-to-date but way too brightly lit, and crowded, and noisy. Moreover, I dislike the theory that attendees must be continually entertained and placated with garish novelties. I don't go to basketball games for the half-time acrobats or the animal acts or the costumed dancers or the "kiss-cam" or the ear-popping "music" nor to be commanded when to cheer or when to chant "DE-FENSE." I go to watch and admire the players. Despite the distractions it was a good game, even though Zion Williamson was out with an ankle injury. These pros, even the unheralded ones, are fabulous athletes and they are especially impressive in person. 

So for most of my life it's been the electronic medium that has kept me abreast of the game. It all started with radio; I suspect that very few readers of this entry will be able to recall the fast-paced narration of Marty Glickman on WHN, but he was, let me tell you, a hoops artist who could bring the Knicks alive with voice alone. Then came television, sometime around the early 1950s. The thirteen inch black-and-white Dumont that my father acquired displayed an image that seemed miraculous at the time but paleolithically primitive compared to the 60" HDTV that entrances me nowadays. It's all present -- right there before my astonished eyes. Incredible no-look passes and sensational blocks and three-pointers from downtown -- and also horrid tattoos -- in brilliant color. In my TV-basketball saturated brain is stored the entire history of the NBA from then until now. In the 50s, Max Zaslofsky, Harry Gallatin, Sweetwater Clifton, Carl Braun, the McGuire brothers Dick and Al, and Ernie Vandeweghe, who played only home games because he was a full-time medical student. A team that was good but always managed to lose to the Celtics -- who had Cousy and Sharman and later Bill Russell, the Jones boys (Sam and KC), Havlicek and Heinsohn. I was in those years a most loyal and enthusiastic fan of our own New York Knickerbockers -- the championship teams composed of Willis Reed, Dave DeBusschere, Bill Bradley, Earl Monroe, and Walt Frazier, names and faces as present in my memory as the more celebrated Dodger boys of summer. Then came the Magic-Bird era, LA "showtime," Michael Jordan, Duncan-Ginobili-Parker-Popovich, and now LeBron James, who, although, he is certainly the most effective player in history, is less exciting to watch than his innovative contemporary, Steph Curry. During this last while, I've become a devoted GSW fan; when they were at their best, a few years ago, they played an extraordinarily beautiful game. There were nights when they'd score 30 baskets on 25 lovely assists. It's been a great ride that's now coming to an end, but there's another generation of players on the horizon and perhaps I'll be around long enough to enjoy them. After all, I've been there for the entire history of the NBA. What developments I have seen! What was once a local, coterie sport has gone international, with many of the best players coming from overseas or south of the border. Where once all the players, save a few, were White and middle-class, now 75% to 80% are Black and inner-city, bringing with them a heck of a lot of skill and flash and dazzle. Lumbering awkward centers, with their slow roundhouse hook shots, have been superseded by astonishingly mobile 7-footers who can protect the rim but also drift outside to nail a three. Salaries, in the old days, were little more than nominal and now there are marginal players making millions off the bench. The athletes have become celebrities -- and their shoes have become almost as famous as they are, and more lucrative. Franchises, which once went for a song, are now worth billions.

When I'm watching a game on a Sunday afternoon, I think about my father. I wish he could sit with me and discuss the progress of the sport. I'd like to show him what has happened since he left us in 1985. He'd like it that the players are bigger, faster, stronger, in better shape, and that the shooting is more accurate and the defenses more subtle and sophisticated. He'd love the pick-and-roll and the pick-and-pop. He'd appreciate the alley-oops and the accurate full court passes. I also know what he wouldn't like -- the overhasty three, the lenient interpretation of walking and palming, and the occasional showboating, Most of all, he'd hate it that the NBA is now in cahoots with the gambling establishment. He would see it, as I do, as a major miscalculation -- as a scandal waiting to happen. 

Every once in a while, even at this advanced age, I dream that I'm in the midst of a game, and I rise up and with an effortless flick of the right wrist launch a perfect 40-foot three that hardly even grazes the net. A childish fantasy, perhaps, but still very  satisfying.  

De Sternuente, or, Of Sneezing

I enjoy fighting off a sneeze. It takes practice and concentration. When the sneeze urge emerges, without warning, the battle is joined. On the side of the sneeze -- dust or some other foreign particles passing through the nasal hairs, reaching  the nasal mucosa, releasing a flood of histamines which irritate the nerve cells and signal the brain to stimulate the trigeminal network and activate the pharyngeal and tracheal muscles, producing a noisy, 100-mile-an-hour blast of microbes and snot. On the side of restraint -- nothing but enormous personal discipline and the desire not to surrender to animal nature. There are some, who are less committed to mind-over-body, who employ the fingertips to pinch the end of the nose, or, alternatively, who press a knuckle against the philtrum, the infranasal depression which Shakespeare, curiously, called "the valley" -- but frankly, when it comes to resisting sternutation, digital success is only half a loaf. It's far more rewarding to think one's way to a rare victory in the lifelong sneezomachia. Not to sneeze is a triumph of the will.

Which is not to assert that a good sneeze gives no pleasure, if a person would give oneself over to it. It's simply that the sneeze, especially one of the window-rattling variety, is entirely anarchic and inartistic, which might be why there is so slight a sneeze literature. Although hard to believe, it's a fact that Puck is the only character in all of Shakespeare's plays who deigns to mention the sneeze, but he weakens its disruptive force by employing the archaism "neeze." The best-known literary sneeze (or, at least, the only one that now comes to mind) occurs in Pope's Rape of the Lock, when Belinda, ravished by Sir Plume's "glittering forfex," throws snuff in the baron's nose. Immediately "with starting tears each eye o'erflows,/ And the high dome re-echoes to his nose."

Snuff artificially stimulates sneezing, which may or may not be be why Michael, Tsar of all the Russians, proposed amputating the noses of snuffers. Michael's contemporary, Pope Urban VIII, merely threatened excommunication. Some say that the practice of saying "God bless you" to sneezers originated with Pope Gregory the Great, and has to do with the superstition that the soul leaves the sneezing body, perhaps nasally.

Why is it that no one ever says "God bless you" to farters, who are as much in need of divine intervention as sneezers. Society demands that farting, though shameful (and belching, though comic), should be controlled; sneezing is, except for the most determined among us, uncontrollable.  

Baseball, 1955 and 2012

In 1955, Duke Snider lived at 178 Marine Avenue (in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge). His was the middle house in this picture.

Gil Hodges lived here, at 1120 32 Street. Two floors, 1400 square feet. 

 
Harold "Pee Wee" Reese and family made their home in 970 square feet of 9714 Barwell Terrace. Carl Erskine's home, at 9318 Lafayette Walk, was even smaller,

   

just 910 square feet.

Sandy Amoros lived in Bed-Stuy, in this brownstone at 147 Bainbridge Street, most likely on just one of the three floors. His was the leftmost building.

 

 And here is Alex Rodriguez's 2012 house in Miami, Florida.  It's up for sale for $38,000,000,

      

which is what 19,681 square foot waterfront properties go for nowadays. A bargain, for all I know.

Cornell English Then and Now -- 1

Here's a truth that blows my freakin' mind: since I earned my B. A. in English from Cornell University in 1960, sixty-five years have come and gone. Glaciers have melted and rivers have changed their course since, way back when, in a prior millennium, I was first introduced to serious literature -- to Chaucer and Milton and George Eliot.

My professors in those far-away-and-long-ago days were exclusively male and for the most part veterans of WW2 or the Korean war. They wrote definitive scholarly articles for the Philological Quarterly or for Modern Philology; they published learned monographs on canonical poets and novelists; and they taught courses with such forthright titles as The Seventeenth Century and Wordsworth and Coleridge. Although I was an indifferent student before I arrived at Cornell, I found an intellectual home in the Department of English. Inasmuch as I did not have a brain for rigorous science or for the tough analytic philosophy that was then in fashion, I was fortunate that the work of English suited my limited abilities -- curiosity, patience, a good memory, and something of a feel for language.

Just yesterday (and what, pray tell, prompted me?), I took a peek at the current website of Cornell's English Department. (In the index-card 1950s, when the manual typewriter was the acme of technology, the word "website" would have signified a dark corner colonized by spiders.) Even at first glance, the 2025 Cornell website said to me "very very different, very 'now'." While an occasional word or phrase was recognizable, it was the novelty -- the modernity, I guess -- that flared from the electronic page and dazzled mine eyne. Time marches on, no doubt, but whether it marches boldly forward or plunges over a cliff remains to be established.  

First of all, it's no longer the Department of English. It's now, hurrah!, the "Department of Literatures in English." What a welcome redefinition -- an assertion that English is a world language and that it houses a world literature. Nowadays, if I sit down with a work of fiction, I'm just as likely to read a novel by a writer from Africa or India or Australia as one from the British isles or North America. There's not a reason in the world why Chinua Achebe or Abdulrazak Gurnah should not be studied in an English Department. I respect this shift in focus and I regret that my 1950s Beowulf-to-T. S. Eliot English department was so parochial, so provincial. I can only admire the fact that the Department of Literatures in English has annexed to itself whole continents of writing -- a case of academic imperialism that this time seems wholly right and just.

The website also reveals that, in a nation in which the study of the humanities in higher education is at risk, Cornell's English is a huge thriving enterprise. There are fifty-one people on permanent staff, almost all of professorial rank. Of this number, twenty-seven -- or slightly more than half -- are women. And among those pictured on the site, a significant number are "of color." Undoubtedly, the present department is a far more representative collection of individuals than my 1950s faculty. Moreover, the chair, the associate chair, the director of undergraduate studies, the director of graduate students, and the director of writing are all women. It may once have been the case that the occasional female interloper was a token for display only, but not so now.

And what do these handsome and distinguished men and women study? Fortunately for me, members of the faculty list their areas of concentration. Most claim two or three specialties, some as many as five; a few recalcitrant individuals list none, leaving me to wonder whether they are polymaths or just ornery uncooperative academics. Among the fifty-one, the single expertise most commonly claimed is "cultural studies." This preponderance set me back a bit, because "cultural studies" is not a term I recognize nor one that existed, as far as I know, in the 1950s, when the word "culture" was synonymous with "civilization" -- sometimes just Western Civilization -- and when "cultured" meant something equivalent to "educated" and possibly even "socially established." But now, apparently, "cultural studies" is, and I quote a respected source, "an academic field  that... investigates how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power. These include ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender." Am I correct, and is it possible, for me to infer from this litany of nouns that "cultural practices" comprehends just about everything that we as a society say or do? Clearly the Department of Literatures in English lays claim to a heck of a lot of intellectual territory -- and that it is a far more aggressive entity than is revealed by its mere absorption of Anglophone novels. I was initially suspicious of these extensive claims, but after reflecting a while I recognized that, if I set to one side the self-aggrandizing listing of ideology, ethnicity, class... etc,), cultural studies may in practice simply bring to the forefront such elements as imperialism and nationhood in Robinson Crusoe or race and gender in Othello. Wouldn't it be comforting if "cultural studies" is at least in part merely traditional wine in spiffy new bottles? I, for one, certainly hope so.

After cultural studies, it is "literary theory" that claims the largest group of adherents -- thirteen, or about a quarter of the faculty. This revelation surprised me because I would have guessed that "theory" had long since gone the way of the aurochs and the mouflon. "Theory" had its herd of enthusiasts in its obscurantist heyday in the last century, yet it seems to be alive and kicking at Cornell -- but only, I suspect, as a vestigial remnant of an earlier time and only among the more senior members of the Department.

Following "theory" in popularity among the professoriate are the seven members who stake their claim to "gender studies." Six other say "African-American." The nine who announce a specialty in creative writing may not know that they are the successors and the beneficiaries of the late revered Professor James McConkey. Not a single member of the faculty offers "Shakespeare" or "Milton" as an area of expertise. I do not doubt that the study of gender and African-American and Asian-American literatures is a good thing, but I would have wished that the authors of the finest works of art in all of Anglophonia be accorded equivalent attention and status.   

Would a reincarnated Youthful Me elect take a degree from such a faculty?  I'm skeptical, but I can't say for sure because I don't know whether or not, in the classroom, the scrupulous examination of literature and ideas has been undermined by transitory and faddish ideologies. I must confess that the biases of the website make me feel old and wary and out of touch. And tired.

Well then, what does take place in the classroom?

Let's sample some evidence.

In days of yore, I enrolled in "Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama," a course taught by the distinguished scholar and teacher David Novarr. The course was organized as a chronological march from Kyd and Marlowe in the 1580s right through to Ford and Massinger -- the last playwrights of significance before the theaters went dark in 1642. I remember savoring some delightful comedies by Ben Jonson and Francis Beaumont and also a couple of ferociously brilliant tragedies by Thomas Middleton -- writings, I suspect, that 2020s English majors are not destined to encounter -- even though an acquaintance with these plays is essential background for understanding the timeless works of Shakespeare.  

There's no equivalent course in the present curriculum, but there is an analogue, and it appears in the catalogue of offerings thusly: 

ENGL 3240. Blood Politics:  Comparative Renaissance Drama

Blood is everywhere. From vampire shows to video games, our culture seems to be obsessed with it. The course examines the power of "blood" in the early modern period as a figure that continues to capture our imagination, not only as a marker of racial, religious, and sexual difference and desire, but also as a dramatic player in its own right. How does a politics of blood appear on stage when populations are being expelled and colonized for reasons (mis)understood in terms of blood?.... Topics include honor, revenge, purity, the body, sexuality, conversion, and death.

The course description itself is a mess -- both incomprehensible and meretricious. I'm shocked by the catchpenny pandering. Do 2020s teachers need to lure students into their classrooms with "vampires" and "videos?" The assertion that "blood is a dramatic player in its own right" is nonsense. The description reads like advertising copy for a cheesy low-budget horror flick playing at some louche all-night grind house.

Moreover, "blood" isn't "everywhere." Goodness gracious!

I'm afraid that these entrancing plays are doomed to be put through the "cultural studies" homogenizer. Or "theorized" out of all compass.

Ah, well.

Back in 1960, I had a summer job in Ithaca and therefore happened to be loafing around the campus when the University hosted its returning alumni. Among the returnees were the old folks  -- some few of them members of the class of 1895 -- who had walkered and wheel-chaired to their Sixty-Fifth. Geezers, I thought. It's sobering to realize that those codgers were the same age -- 86 -- as I am now. Should I  return to Ithaca this coming spring, for my very own Sixty-Fifth, I will be perceived by the young 'uns exactly as I observed those Class of 1895 guys: as ancient and irrelevant.

It follows, therefore, that my reservations about the 2025 English curriculum have their exact parallel in the 1895ers perspective on my 1960 curriculum. It's not hard to imagine that they -- I mean the members of the class of 1895 -- who had been educated in elocution and Old Norse, would have been shocked and perhaps outraged by the 1950s "modern" curriculum that I found so enticing and illuminating.

And now, because I don't want to go full curmudgeon and become the kind of superannuated guy who shakes his ebony stick at the modern world and deplores the decline of civilization, I'm going to make an effort to find out what's really going on in 2025. I have therefore set myself the task of reading a representative sample of the books written by members of the present-day English faculty.

I'll report on my studies right here.

Stay tuned.

[January 18] Bernhard Starr writes:  "Vivian, you are right about the course description. It's a disgrace. It's badly written and ridiculous. Why didn't you include the name of the prof. who wrote it?  He/she needs to be exposed. What "populations are being expelled and colonized" by Volpone or The Changeling?  And did you look other course descriptions -- are they equally silly?  What's worst about the course description is that it doesn't respect the plays that the class is going to examine. They're not important interesting dramas to the teacher -- they're just fodder for an ideology. 

[January 19] Vivian de St. Vrain replies: "Mr. Starr, I didn't identify the author of the course description because the website doesn't identify him/her. Just as well. Also, I didn't read other course descriptions though I might do so in the future. I think you're correct that the course description does not respect the dramas or their authors. Which is, as you suggest, mighty disappointing." 

[January 19] Bernhard Starr replies:  "I think I'd rather study Old Norse."

[February 4] Thurston Dale replies:  "I guess I'm a geezer, too (Cornell, '65). I'm glad I majored in English before criticism turned crazy. Great teachers -- Mizener, Abrams, Parrish, Novarr."

[March 17] Anatole Miles Webber writes: "Vivian, you were naive back in the 1950s and you're still naive now. You assume that the Cornell English Department of your youth, 65 years ago, was normative and normal. You were then and still are oblivious to the fact that the Department's 1950 curriculum was the product of stress and change and compromise. Try to remember that there were at least three forces at work and that various faculty members had various degrees of commitment to them. The first group was the oldest -- the traditionalist who studied, as they had always done, literature as history and biography and philology. Get the text and the context right was their primary concern. Then there were the 'new critics" -- heirs to Leavis and Scrutiny in England and the southern agrarians (Ransom, Tate, Warren) in the US. But the main intellectual current riling English Departments were the fierce critics out of New York (mostly Jewish) circles (Kazin, Trilling, Fiedler, Paul Goodman, Irving Howe, etc). In retrospect, even though Cornell brought both Lionel Trilling and Cleanth Brooks to Ithaca during your and my years there, the new winds made little impression on our education. Cornell was peaceful, isolated and non-ideological. It appears from your writing that you preferred it that way and still do. It was stable until the theory people brought in novelty and confusion and excitement.

[April 15] Parnell Pratt replies: "And also monumental pretension. And eventual collapse and failure."

[May 3] Lance Birdseye (Lt., USAF) writes: "What a funny website this is. Hey, folks, join the real world."

 

New Old Books from the 1940s

I read George Hutchinson's Facing the Abyss, a report on the culture of the 1940. Hutchinson assesses books that were influential during that troubled decade.

When I came of age in the 1950s, I encountered a good share of these books. I was a curious, library-addicted lad and 1940s culture lingered in the 1950s air. Yet Hutchinson brings to attention whole shelves of important writing of which I was shamefully ignorant. Through the resources of Interlibrary Loan and second-hand internet bookstores, I've now become acquainted with a bunch of new old books. Here's some of them (with more to follow). 

Hutchinson claims that Jo Sinclair's Wasteland (1946) is an important contribution to the Jewish-American novel. Perhaps it is, by priority, but I found it disappointing and superficial. The main man, Jacob Braunowitz changes his name to John Brown and hides his Jewishness, but it doesn't work -- he lives in a "wasteland" neither integrated into America nor bolstered by his inherited religion. Along comes a Freudian psychoanalyst and in a few magical sessions Brown is liberated to embrace his Judaism. For me, the novel was simplistic and implausible. Harry Brown's A Walk in the Sun (1944) is the most persuasive and realistic war novel I've ever read -- it accomplishes more in 150 pages that Norman Mailer achieved in 600. Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac (1949 is a pioneering classic of environmentalism -- though nowadays less widely known than Rachel Carson's Silent Spring but much more learned and innovative. It's a very good book but frankly I found the "lyrical" prose a bit too gooey for my taste. Isaac Rosenfeld's Passage from Home is a distinguished novel of adolescent alienation. It's kinky (about a boy's semi-sexual relationship to his deceased mother's sister). It's a far better novel, I think, than Salinger's similar and imitative Catcher in the Rye. What a pity that Rosenfeld died of a heart attack at age 38!  A great loss to literature. I also read Anatole Broyard's Kafka Was the Rage, a memoir of Greenwich Village in the 1940s although not published until 1985. It's a noteworthy collection of short essay, able to be much more candid about sex and sexuality than if it had appeared during the time it chronicles. Broyard claims that 1946 was the best year ever: the war was over and he had freedom and the G I Bill. 

A pretty good for me too -- in 1946 just seven years old, sitting on the sunny stoop eating raisins.

Trump, Chaucer, etc.

Chaucer's Pardoner, some will remember, has long blonde hair and speaks in a high treble voice. Chaucer calls him "a gelding or a mare." A gelding is obviously a eunuch; what Chaucer means by mare is less clear -- perhaps "female eunuch" -- whatever that entails -- or a gay male or possibly even a woman cross-dressed as a man. In any case, a person of ambiguous sexuality -- "gender fluid" in modern idiom. 

Update: the Naval Academy Nimitz library at Annapolis has purged from its shelves a book by Robert S. Sturges called  "Chaucer's Pardoner: Gender Theory." Isn't it reassuring that our national security will no longer be endangered by a discussion of the Pardoner's identity.

The list of 381 censored books can be found at

https://media.defense.gov/2025/Apr/04/2003683009/-1/-1/0/250404-LIST%20OF%20REMOVED%20BOOKS%20FROM%20NIMITZ%20LIBRARY.PDF

Cornell English Then and Now -- 6

After struggling through a run of mysterious and puzzling works, I'm cheered to discover a book written by Cornell English faculty member that I could read with pleasure from beginning to end. And understand. And which alerted me to books and poems with which I was not familiar. No theory, no pretentious jargon; just honest scholarship and intelligent stylish analysis, 

It's Facing the Abyss, American Literature and Culture in the 1940s, by George Hutchinson, who is Cornell's Farr Professor of American Culture.

Unlike Professor Hutchinson, who is a considerably younger man, I myself was alive (although barely sentient) during the 1940s. I was too young for serious reading, so 1940s culture didn't come to my aluminum desk until the 1950s when I belatedly came to awareness. As a result, I read many of the books that Hutchinson discusses a decade past their relevance. Hutchinson also mentions many influential books that I didn't read at all and therefore came as a surprise -- and which underlined my ignorance. For example, during the 1950s, my high school and college years, I read many books of 1940s Jewish American writers to whom Hutchinson devotes a long chapter: Mailer, Bellow, Malamud, Rukeyser, Arthur Miller, etc. But my acquaintance was incomplete. I confess that I had never heard the names of Jo Sinclair or Isaac Rosenthal, both of whom Hutchinson scrutinizes at full. One name missing from Hutchinson's survey is J D Salinger, who started to publish in the 40s but only became famous with Cather in the Rye in 1951. Just as well -- I never caught Salinger fever although many of my friends were quite infected. 

Hutchinson has presented me with a reading list of books that I should have known but didn't and that will keep me engaged for months. I'm grateful.

Hutchinson's chapter on WWII is most revelatory. Without being unduly partisan, it exposes and corrects the "greatest generation" mythology that I had half come to accept. 

After reading Facing the Abyss, I continued my investigation of Cornell English faculty publications by taking a couple of wild swings at Elizabeth S. Anker's mystifying On Paradox, the Claims of Theory (Duke UP, 2022). (Anker holds a joint appointment in Cornell's law school and its Department of Literature in English.) I can say just two things for certain about this difficult book: a) I didn't understand two consecutive sentences, and b) it's not about literature, not even tangentially. In fact, I'm not sure what it's about -- as far as I can tell, it's not about the law. I have rarely attempted anything in English prose that I found quite so impenetrable. I never even grasped what Anker means by paradox.

I'm sure it's mea maxima culpa, but so be it. 

 

[April 4] PGB writes: "Every time you post something, it becomes ever clearer that you're not the right person for this investigation. Give it up and stick to something within your abilities, like basketball. You write well on basketball. Do yourself a favor: stay away from the deeper issues that Anker discusses."

[April 4]  Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Perhaps you're right, PGB (whoever you are). The shoemaker should stick to his last. This Anker book is not intended for me, but I I wonder for whom it is intended. It's got to be an extremely small specialized audience. Six or eight people, worldwide. I doubt anyone on Cornell's English faculty then or now could make heads or tails of it."

[April 6]  Artie Greengroin writes: "Thanks for hanging in there.  I hope you find other Cornell English Professors who know how to write English. I'm not optimistic, though. BTW, I think PGB is harshing on you, but I agree that your basketball essays are pretty good."

[April 8] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Thanks for the recommendation, Artie and PGB. If anyone is interested, my basketball essays are here.

[April 9]  Charles Evans (Mercer College) writes: "I agree. Vivian, your notes on basketball are quite good. But you're just not smart enough to understand philosophy."

[April 10] Joe J. Keen (Northwest Nazarene University, Nampa, Idaho) writes: "I agree with Charles Evans. The basketball entries are amusing. But, Vivian, you're no philosopher."

[April 16] Vivian de St. Vrain writes: The "Artie Greengroin" who posted on April 6 does not exist. Artie Greengroin is not a real person; he's a character invented by the WWII novelist Harry Brown. Come on, Artie you can use your real name. Don't be afraid. Don't hide behind a pseudonym. We're all friends here."

[April 30]. Chester Bacon writes: "Thanks for bringing the Hutchinson book to my attention.  I've read and been enlightened by it. But following your recommendation I'll stay away from the Anker book. And I do like your basketball essays."

Driftin'

Every once in a while, I experience something that I call a "cultural convergence" -- perhaps an event reported in a daily newspaper that closely resembles something on the very page of the novel that I happen to be reading. A cross-genre overlap, let us say.

Here's in example of such a coincidence that amused me much.  

Yesterday evening I watched the classic western The Magnificent Seven (1960) and this morning I read, once again, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. It's hard to believe but yes, there is a very brief moment where two such very distinct works brush against one another.  

Unlike TN, The Magnificent Seven is a violent spectacle that steers clear of humor, or subtle characterization or extensive dialogue. After the climactic concluding battle to preserve the Mexican village has been both lost and won, the two surviving gunmen share a moment before trotting off on their separate ways. Chris Adams (Yul Brynner) inquires of Vin Tanner (Steve McQueen) if he has a plan for what comes next. Laconic Vin, cowpoke and gunslinger, responds, "driftin'. 

In Twelfth Night, there's a similar question and a similar answer, but in a far different idiom. Antonio asks Sebastian, who has survived a shipwreck, about his plans. Sebastian's view of his future is essentially the same as Vin's, but there is none of that "ah shucks" minimalism in his reply. Instead, Sebastian responds, "My determinate voyage is mere extravagancy."  

[While Vin's one-word answer is clear as clear can be, Sebastian's "mere extravagancy" requires a bit of a gloss. Nowadays, "extravagancy" (usually "extravagance") signifies a "lack of restrain in purchasing luxury goods." Not so in 1600, when "extravagant" remained much closer to its root etymological inheritance. The word descends from L. vagare, "to wander." Extra-vagance therefore means something like "wander beyond." Here's a more familiar example of the word at work: when Roderigo characterizes Othello as an "extravagant and wheeling stranger," he does not criticize Othello for spending too many ducats on his fancy get-up. He means that he's a rootless and wandering non-native. (Wheeling? my dictionary glosses wheeling as "roving, wandering, drifting"). And also: "mere" did not then connote triviality; its meaning is closer to "pure." "Determinate" meant and still means "decided.")

Therefore Sebastian's sentence --"My determinate voyage is mere extravagancy" -- is directly equivalent to  Vin's "driftin''". Cultural convergence at its best.

It's just two ways of talkin'. 

I sometimes wonder about Shakespeare's intent here. Why did he bother to put such a difficult sentence in Sebastian's mouth? For purposes of characterization, certainly. But at the expense of clarity. Wouldn't it have been more economical, more transparent, for Sebastian to say something plain, such as "I don't have a plan, I'll just wander." It's certain that some percentage of Shakespeare's audience, perhaps most, will not grasp the meaning  of the sentence as written and will be left puzzled. Yet as he so often does, Shakespeare preferred eloquence to transparency. 

In my opinion, Shakespeare delighted in his own fluency.  And sometimes I think that Shakespeare wasn't just writing to be heard by his Globe or Blackfriars audience. He was writing to be read and studied --  although I doubt he could have imagined a future in which his sentences would be glossed with crowded inches of small-type footnotes.

It it possible that Shakespeare also had an inkling that, as Beethoven once put it, he was writing for "a latter age?"

It's Big! We're Little!

Can it possibly be true that the universe as we know it is becoming larger and larger? The more we learn, the more it seems to expand. The scientists who know about such things now brag that the Milky Way numbers between 200 and 300 billion stars, nearly all of which are probably circled by planets. Moreover, these same experts now claim that there are something like one or two trillion such configurations -- some of them small but most larger than our own personal galaxy. And to top all that, there's a rumor circulating that our universe might be just one of an untold, possibly infinite number of other universes. Some of them Big Banging, some expanding, some collapsing.

These numbers are staggering and incomprehensible, at least to me. I can't even get a hold of a million of anything, even grains of sand, let alone a billion (a thousand million!) enormous stars.

Now they tell me that our universe began 13.8 billion years ago, more or less, and will go on for a hundred billion more. That's another very large number for me (or you) to assimilate. 

It's all mighty perplexing. And then let me add the toughest question of all: why is there something rather than nothing? Yes, why is that? How come?

There are some who find this sort of information dismaying because it confirms the triviality, the meaninglessness of our individual lives. How can I possibly worry about last night's insomnia or my latest nosebleed -- or indeed my very own life -- in a world of a gazillion planets, stars, ultramassive black holes, neutron stars, galaxies, and a universe which may have no discernible boundary or beginning or ending.

Yet I myself find all this information not dismaying but comforting - maybe even inspiring.

What are the odds that a planet might support life? Very small. And that the planet's precarious lifeforms would evolve for a couple of billions of years and then generate intelligent life?  And that a million years of mating and surviving by various evolving primitive and then recognizable humans might lead to my ancestors -- and that after thousands of lucky matings eventually resolve into my parents Manny and Lil who happened upon the precise instant to beget Me. And that I, in the second half of my 80s, way past my shelf life, would still be here to enjoy these extra innings.

All this work of creation and evolution and luck to culminate in Me.  

It's a miracle of cosmic proportions and should be hosannahed. Here I am, enjoying my still functioning brain. My stomach is mellow after a full meal and my skin is glowing from a stroll in the warm sun. At the end of the day, I will crawl under the covers with my bedmate and ladylove. Truly the stars have aligned to my benefit.

Nor let us not underestimate  the consummate joy of mattress and blanket.

My assemblage of molecules has had a great run -- much more than could be reasonably anticipated.  Soon my molecules will disassemble and then reassemble into someone else. I'm very glad to contribute to this phenomenon. 

But if so -- if we are so fortunate, as I believe us to be, why don't we as a people celebrate our good fortune? Take pleasure in our lives. What's the need for this continuing strife and wars and enslavements and genocides? What's the point of it? We're all sitting here, billions of us, for a second or so in an infinitely boundless and timeless universe. Why must half of us make life miserable for the other half? Why can't all we just get along?

Truly we are a horrid species.

I wonder whether other planets that support intelligent life have done any better. I hope so.

Words of My Life -- Text

I first encountered the word "text" -- as did everyone else of my cohort -- as the first component of "textbook." At P S 217, textbooks were issued on the first day of school. Then, later in the day, we ritually scissored brown paper grocery bags and improvised protective book covers. It was not unusual for the covers to be in better shape than the retirement-eligible books. At college, I was surprised to find that I was required to purchase my own textbooks -- a discovery that busted a hole in my precarious budget. 

And then the word "text" sat still for a number of years until it emerged as a term of art in critical theory. "Text" became a generic word for anything written: novels, poems, plays, signs, advertising slogans, tattoos -- anything that could be analyzed and discussed. I think, in retrospect, that the idea was not to "privilege" one form of writing over another. "Text" is to poem as "provider" is to doctor.

Nowadays, "text" has emerged from the gloom of academic criticism and has become the most frequently used of words. Who could have predicted it? I myself, formerly a writer of letters and postcards and until recently of emails, and for many years at one point a user of the telephone, now send and receive multiple "texts" in a day.

The noun has also acquired a variety of verb forms: "I'll text you"; "I texted you";   "Text me when you arrive"; "Talk to you later.  I'm texting."

All derived, ultimately, from L. texere textus, to weave; or textor, a weaver.

The use of "text" in religious ceremony, as in a cleric's, "today's text is..." has never been a part of my life.

Cornell English Then and Now -- 5

Elisha Cohn is an associate professor in Cornell's Department of Literatures in English. Her Still Life, Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (2016) strikes me as two books in one. The first is quite lovely and filled with a variety of splendid apercus. Cohn explores "lyric moments" in the novels (confession: I read closely only the chapter on Thomas Hardy, the novelist with whom I'm most familiar). She observes that Hardy (a poet as well as a novelist) occasionally stops the progress of the story and allows his characters to experience a moment of stasis or reflection or reverie that is more a characteristic of lyric poetry than prose. I was much impressed by her analyses of these moments -- and wondered why I had failed to notice such events -- or non-events -- myself. So criticism did what it's supposed to do -- widens our understanding and appreciation of works of literature. I returned to the Victorian novel armed with a new way of seeing. In fact, I'm now reading Little Dorrit again for the express purpose of ascertaining whether a non-poet like Dickens employs the same Still Life method. So far, not the case -- Dickens has his own particular (and very successful) methods of expanding the consciousness of his characters.

Ah, but then there's the other side of Cohn's book which attempts to develop her useful insights within the slough of "theory." I half suspect that Cohn felt obliged to make herself relevant or contemporary or tenure-worthy with her tumble into this quicksand -- but perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps she devoutly believes in an apparatus that I find so incomprehensible and transient. In this second part of the book, many famous names are invoked and admired; some of these are very French and very revered; others  are merely professors at American universities. Pages of text and footnotes defend against the horrid possibility that Still Life might be "insufficiently theorized." And in these speculative paragraphs Cohn discusses the deprivilegization of hierarchical thought in favor of forms of lateralization in which individuations are impersonal and singularities are pre-individual and which reterritorialize along the lines of preexisting structures of power which re-consolidate into static concepts, etc., etc. Which is when I either descend into a reverie (or nightmare) of my own or hurl he book across the room.

 

[February 23  Audrey ap Howell writes:  "Vivian de St. Vrain, you've go it wrong. The notion that there are poetic moments in the novels is well established. The originality of this book lies in its theorizing of these moments. You would know this if you had read carefully and not skimmed." 

[February 24] J C Occhiogrosso writes: "This is a well-written book. Complicated but not obscure."

[February 25]  Reuben Musgrave writes:  "I bet that Cohn is a delightful teacher -- if she keeps to the events in the novels and stays away from bewildering 'theory.'"

[February 25] Savannah Courtermanche writes:  "All novelists pause the plot for moments of reflection. Nothing new here."    

[March 5]  Joy Jourgenson writes:  "This difficult monograph would have been more useful as a series of short, insightful essays.  Too bad it had to be expanded into a repetitive static book. Not the author's fault -- just the tune of the times."

[March 6]  Eli Munn writes:  "Vivian, you're too old and out of it to have an opinion worth anything. Shut it down and go back to your knitting."

[March 15] Rogers Roggen writes:  "I wonder, Vivian, how you can work yourself up into such a snit about Cornell when the USA is going to hell in a handbasket. Shouldn't you put your effort into more pressing matters."

[March 18] Homer vanNess writes:  "Reuben Musgrave, are you possibly the "Cousin Rube" that I heard my parents mention? I know there's a Musgrave branch to my family. (I found your name doing a random googlesearch). If you are Cousin Rube, could you pm me at [email protected]. I'd love to hear from you. I think you went to Cornell; so did I but much later."

 

Cornell English Then and Now - 4

Vivian de St. Vrain writes: "Cathy Caruth is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of English at Cornell University. She has written quite a number of books but the one that I selected for this Cornell English Department project, partly because of its engaging title, is Literature in the Ashes of History. Alas, the title is misleading, because Caruth doesn't concern herself with literature in any recognizable way. Rather, the book investigates psychoanalytic theories, especially of loss and trauma. Although in an earlier part of my life I read and studied all of Freud's major works, I found this book to be far too subtle and abstruse for my downright brain. I have therefore asked assistance from my long time friend A. Barnett Langdale, Jr. Barney is a very smart medical school graduate, a therapist, and psychologist (though not a psychoanalyst) and a person for whose opinions I have great regard."

A. Barnett Langdale, Jr., writes: "Thanks, Viv, for entrusting me with the of task of reading and evaluating this book. I fear that I shall disappoint you, because I had a hard time understanding Literature in the Ashes of History. In order to profit from reading this book, one must accept certain assumptions about Sigmund Freud and about the art of psychoanalysis. Caruth sets out to modify and reinterpret the famous fort-da episode in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This became an immediate problem for me, because I have never agreed with Freud's analysis of his grandson's play -- perhaps because his interpretation clashes with what I have  learned from long years of closely observing children in my professional practice. Events such as fort-da can generate a spectrum of meanings and a variety of interpretations equally as valid or invalid as Freud's. As I result, I read this book with a great deal of resistance to its assumptions and their ramifications.

Many of the arguments that Caruth creates ("suggests" is her usual verb) are too arcane for me. She carries her readers away from common sense. She inhabits an intellectual world in which every event or fact carries its own negation. And that negation bears a consequent negation, and so on ad infinitum, like the images in a pair of opposed mirrors, leading inevitably to a situation in which, as Macbeth says, "function/ Is smothered in surmise and nothing is/ But what is not."

Vivian de St. Vrain responds: 'Many thanks, Barney. In the course of reading Literature in the Ashes of History, I came to think that its procedure is, in a sense, a lot like theology. If you make certain assumptions about god and angels and creation, you can generate a fantastically complicated superstructure of ideas that has absolutely no relations to the world in which we dwell. This book is not theology, it's psychoanalytic theory, but it shares a similar procedure, because, despite its highly-elaborated complexity, its assumptions are unprovable if not absolutely false. Intelligence and sophistication can take you only so far. I'm afraid that in the end, there's no more heft in this kind of study than there is in theology -- the "subject without an object." Ultimately, it's Cloud-Cuckoo-Land." 

 

 

[February 15] Walter Balletto writes: "Before you dismiss this intelligent book out of hand, you might want to read the ecstatic review by Michael Levine in The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis. It's online. Levine makes the effort to read carefully, which neither you nor your friend Langdale do."  

[February 15] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "At first I thought that Mr. Balletto was being ironic, inventing an improbable self-parodic name for an academic journal. Who would believe there is actually such a publication? But I looked it up and, by golly, it's real. Moreover, it's published, mirabile dictu, by the University of Nebraska Press!!!"

[February 16] Janet Rich asks: "You haven't said anything about Caruth's presence in a Department of English. Shouldn't she relocate to Psychology?"

[February 16] Herbert Lecovin (Cornell '61) asks: "I wonder how many of Caruth's colleagues can read and understand her work?"

[February 16] Anita Robillard writes: "Caruth is on an island, and instead of welcoming friends to join her, she erects walls and barricades to keep them out."

[February 17] Joel Salzberg writes: "What do you mean by "island." She teaches at Cornell; Cornell's not an island."

[February 17] Anita Robillard writes: "It's a metaphor, Joel."

[February 17] Herman S. Levi writes: "I don't understand why you compare psychoanalysis to theology. They're nothing alike."

[February 18] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Professor Levi, let me refer you to a familiar passage in the Leviathan, where Hobbes writes of "names that signifie nothing, but are taken up and learned by rote from the Schooles, as hypostatical, transubstantiate, consubstantiate, eternal-Now and the like canting of Schoolemen." Similarly, the words of psychoanalysis, such as pleasure principle, Ego, etc. signify nothing at all. Theologians and psychoanalysts can be very smart people, but the net practical result of their involuted speculation is transitory, wrong, useless, specious, and false."

[April 1]  Skye Barasch writes:  So, Vivian, is there anyone on the Cornell English faculty whose work meets your antiquated approval?  It's all bad, according to you.

[April 1]  Vivian de St, Vrain responds: Actually, Ms/Mr Barasch, I'm just about to add a paragraph on a member of the faculty whose book was very informative and comprehensible. No abstruse jargon, I'm glad to say.  Stay tuned;  my comments will appear here in a day or two. I do wonder, now that I think of it, if I'm unconsciously picking the least approachable books to report on. I'll try to mend my ways.

Wisdom from my Father

When dealing with a child, always make your appeal to the better side of his/her nature. 

No one owns anything; the most you can say is that you have a lifetime lease on it.

As far as I can tell, I am just a long link in a chain going from nowhere to nowhere.

If you lose your man, go directly to the basket. 

Never omit an opportunity to do a favor for a friend, and never be embarrassed to accept a favor from a friend.  People like to help one another.

Anyone can make money if he makes it the sole business of his life to do so.

When the stock market is going up, everyone is  a genius.

The czars and the rabbis kept our family in darkness for a thousand years. It took hundreds of years for us to fight our way out of the ghetto, and they (the orthodox and the Hasids) want to put themselves back in it.

Don't forget to wash behind your ears.

Mary Antin, The Promised Land (1911)

I have just read Mary Antin's autobiography, The Promised Land, first published in 1911. It is a book that I should have known much earlier in my life but only discovered a week or so ago. The larger part The Promised Land is the familiar story of immigrant life in a new country -- the author's struggles to adapt to an unfamiliar culture, her achievements and triumphs, and her unabashed flag-waving patriotism. More strange and more informative, is the picture of life "old country," as viewed through the eyes of a young woman.  Antin grew up in provincial, impoverished Polotzk, a small city now in Belarus, but which at various times has been administered and exploited by the ungentle hands of Varangians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Germans. During Antin's youth (she was born in 1881), Polotsk was a part of Russia. It was not a good time to be a Jew in Polotsk or indeed anywhere within the Pale of Settlement. (Her story is especially pertinent because I myself have a hunk of Belarusian-Jewish genes -- as do, therefore, my children and grandchildren.) 

Antin's life in that bleak part of the world was, I think, triply suppressed. In political freedom and standard of living, by the Russians; in domestic and personal relations, by oppressive Hasidism and the rabbis who enforced its demanding rules; and thirdly, because Antin had the misfortune to be born female. She had every reason to leave Polotsk behind.   

Antin recognized early that she was a "prisoner" because "the Czar" commanded Jews to stay within the Pale. She "accepted ill usage from the Gentiles as one accepts the weather. The world was made in a certain way and I had to live in it." Polotsk was a place of constant ethnic strife fueled by dangerous superstitions. "The Gentiles said that we had killed their god and that we used the blood of murdered Christian children in the Passover." The Jewish community of Polotsk was always under threat of violence -- "the peasants would fill themselves with vodka, and set out to kill Jews. They attacked with knives and clubs and scythes and axes, killed them or tortured them, and burned their houses. This was called a pogrom." There was also the threat of the draft, where recruits served until the age of 41. (My maternal grandfather, Joseph (Usilewski) Green told me that he had been drafted into the Russian army for a twenty-year term; I now understand that he must have entered the army at age 21. In 1904 Grandpa, age 26, deserted and came to America. Good move.) Some men escaped the draft by paying crippling bribes to conscription officers. Taxation was onerous. "Peace cost so much a year in Polotsk."

Antin also explains that as stifling as was the Czar, the rules of religion were harsher. "Within the wall raised by the vigilance of the police, another wall, higher, thicker, more impenetrable was the religion of  the Jews." The rabbis favored piety (as they conceived it) to independence or freedom or prosperity and they enforced the most minute regulations and prohibitions of all actions day and night. Antin tells of a wife who found a blemish on the chicken she was preparing to cook. She consulted the rabbi who pronounced the chicken traif. That night, the family went hungry.

Polotsk seems to have had no dissenters or freethinkers, or at least none that Antin notes. I imagine that those who challenged orthodoxy either left of their own accord or were shunned.

Girls were offered little outside the family kitchen or nursery.  They were expected to marry young and produce many children, especially sons who could distinguish the family with their Torah studies. Schooling was discouraged for girls, who were taught to pronounce but not understand Hebrew. 

At its prime, Polotsk had 60,000 inhabitants, perhaps 60 per cent of whom were Jewish. There were twenty-three synagogues. Today there are no synagogues and no Jews.

Gravestones

I've never visited my parents' graves. I don't even know where they are buried. I've been told that my father is buried between my mother and his sister Mollie, but I don't know where they lie. I have a paper that tells me where my sister Susan, who died as an infant, is buried, but I've never been there. I don't know where my brother Eugene lies.

I know exactly where Althea and Phyllis are buried -- just up the hill, under the big maple. I visit once a year and bring a stone to place on their markers. Phyllis's is a bronze plaque affixed to a stone; Althea's is just the capital letter A and her dates (1939-2016). It's what she wanted.  

Dan Goss is buried in Staten Island somewhere. I visited once, with Althea. A's mother, Grandma Anne, wanted her ashes divided in half and spread, part with Phyllis and part with Dan.  She has no gravestone, nor wanted one.

I have told my family that I want my tombstone to read, "No more insomnia, forever." But that's a joke.  

Nowadays it's the custom to scatter the ashes on a favorite place, which is nice, but there's no place to visit. Especially no place for those buried at sea.

On the Mall

After a severe cold snap, it's a welcome warm Friday afternoon. We're on the semi-famous mall enjoying a long-postponed promenade. A woman, in her seventies, stops us. "Can you help me?" I'm embarrassed to confess that my first reaction to her plea was that she must be one of our many panhandlers. But not so. She continued: "It's my husband, he has Parkinson's, can you help me get him to the car?" He, Bill, was standing frozen, unable to speak, unable to move, his balance precarious. "Two years ago," she said,"he was robust. He's having a bad day." And indeed he was. I took Bill's left arm under the shoulder, his wife the other arm. Lynn grasped my left hand and carried Bill's useless stick, and together we shuffled him infinitely slowly and gently to the curb. "I thought we could go out for coffee," she said, "but I was wrong." While we stood quietly, Bill's wife went to fetch their car which was parked only fifty feet away. She backed it to where we stood (Lynn now supporting Bill on his right side). We helped Bill into passenger seat. His wife buckled him in.

I asked her, "do you have help?'  "Yes, she said, "friends." "Do you have children?" "Yes, but they don't live nearby." She thanked us generously and drove off.

I was sad for both him and her. He, because his dreadful disease is going to kill him very soon. And she, because her life now consists of morning-to-night care taking -- in bed, out of bed; dressing and undressing; into a comfortable chair for a while and then and out of it; brief awkward walks; three times a day lifting the spoon to his lips. And what's known in the care taking trade as "toileting."

I'm convinced that she doesn't know how bad he is. Caretakers are always behind, always catching up. If she knew, she'd have had a wheelchair at the ready. He needs constant care-- not just family or friends, but professional assistance. Can they afford a place in a memory care facility or nursing home? Not everyone can.

Afterward the incident, we went to a coffee shop -- a normalizing activity for us. But, sitting there, I was shaken. Certainly profound sadness for the ill husband and the encumbered wife, and in addition a touch of personal PTSD. 

And then the inevitable pondering. "To this favor must we come." It's not just Bill. We're all doomed -- even that cute infant in the next booth, rapturously examining her fingertips. A host of diseases, some as bad as Parkinson's, waiting at the door, waiting.

Cornell English Then and Now -- 3C

I'm a lifelong fan of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. I love all the shipboard stuff, the adventure, the exoticism, Crusoe's self-reliance, his  psychological complexity, his religious ponderings, and especially the recapitulation of nascent capitalism on the island. I'm as entranced as ever by the attempt to domesticate goats, by his attempt to build a boat, by the single footprint on the beach, by Friday's escape and the battle with the cannibals. With a little effort, I have been able to set to one side the novel's faults: the author's careless repetitions, his appalling colonialist racism, those last anticlimactic adventures and the return to England, the unnatural absence of sexuality or passion, the paranoia and the unnecessary violence. Massive defects, yes indeed, but Robinson Crusoe is still a great eternally wonderful mishmash of a novel. 

So it came as a surprise to read Laura Brown's one-sentence summary of the novel in The Counterhuman Imaginary: "Robinson Crusoe enacts a self-creative other-than-human vitality by setting matter in motion through the persistent repetition of irresistible succession."  

Maybe Robinson Crusoe does "enact" and "set matter in motion" -- I don't know, can't say. But I do not plan to undergo the pain and woe of making sense out of her ungainly and mystifying sentence. For Laura Brown, Robinson Crusoe is not the pleasure and challenge that it has been for three hundred years -- it's just raw material for her dry-as-dust ideological machine.

And a waste of my precious time.

 

[February 1] Bernhard Starr writes:  "Brown transforms the gold of literature into the dross of criticism."

[February 1] Professor Merlon Crenelle, Southwestern Louisiana U., writes: "Vivian, you're totally unfair. You take one sentence out of the chapter and make fun of it. You don't even bother to see how the sentence is related to the larger argument. You owe Professor Laura Brown an apology. You're irresponsible."

[February 1] Marianne Morrison, Ph. D. writes: "Vivian, I agree with Mr. (Ms.?) Crenelle. Youve not tried to understand Brown. Your lazy."

[February 2] Vivian de St. Vrain responds:  "Whether I'm lazy or not, Brown writes in an obscure code. Why should I have to try to crack the code?  Why can't she write in English? She's a Professor of English, for goodness sake. It's not my job to figure out what she's trying to say; it's her job to make it plain."

[February 2] Sean R. Fine writes: "It makes me wonder about the "imaginary" in which Laura Brown seems to thrive. Closed, cloistered, self-congratulatory."

[February 3] Thurman Valentino (SVDGA) writes: "I think that Vivian de St. Vrain is absolutely correct not to try to figure out what that sentence means. It's not a reader's responsibility. My opinion is that Laura Brown is smart enough to produce a complicated argument, but not smart enough to make complicated argument clear."

[February 3] Michael F. Bristol writes: "Or maybe, dear Viv, you're not smart enough to figure it all out."

[February 4] Vivian de St. Vrain replies: "OK, Bristol, if you're so smart why don't you just tell us exactly what "persistent repetition of irresistible succession" means."  

[February 4] J C Occhiogrosso suggests: "One thing regularly follows another?"

[February 7] Beulah Withee writes:  "The problem is not with just that one sentence. It's that whole paragraphs and pages are filled with such difficult sentences. After each of these, a reader has to pause and interpret before going on to the next one. It puts far too much burden on the reader." 

[February 9] Gabriel Cussen III writes: "I tried to read the book but I didn't get very far. Do visitors to this blog remember the criticism of academic articles and books: "What is new is not true and what is true is not new." This book is even worse, because what's true is utterly trivial."

[February 9] Bernhard Starr responds: "Gabriel Cussen, I agree with you.  There's no there there."

[February 13]. Herbert Lecovin (Cornell '61) writes: "The important question is what is going on in her classroom. Does she lecture in this dialect and does she expect her students to write as she does?

Cornell English Then and Now: 3B

I'm still trying to come to terms with Laura Brown's book, The Counterhuman Imaginary. I've wrestled the title to a draw, and now I'm going to take a crack at the Introduction. Is this task a good use of my limited time?

Let me quote a sentence that I take to be the very heart of the book and the heart of the problem. It's a doozy.

"Human story telling is found to provide a subtle scenario for affirming the other-than-human, based on an imputed commonality that replaces human priority with cross-species inclusivity that transcends the human." 

Laura Brown's prose reads as if it were first drafted in German and then rendered into English by Google Translate.  

It takes effort, but once you penetrate its peculiar idiom, it makes a kind of sense. For those of my readers who are still with me, let me try to parse this sentence. I suspect It may mean something like, "human beings project thoughts and feelings onto animals and objects."

"Human story telling" [that is, literature]

"is found to provide" [the passive "is found," should be deleted even though it functions as a compliment to the person (i.e. the author herself) to whom this insight has been revealed.]

"a subtle scenario" [I don't know exactly what the phrase "subtle scenario" means; nor do I think that anyone else does.] 

"based on an imputed commonality " [I understand "commonality" because I know that humans and animals share many features. I don't see the necessity for the word 'imputed"; imputed by whom? who other than humans can "impute."] 

"that replaces human priority" [i.e. there should be no preference for humans over animals and rocks, despite the paradox that humans and not animals can think about the equivalence.] 

"with cross-species inclusivity" ["inclusivity" is implicit in the previous rejection of "human priority." Wow, these abstract nouns do pile up (commonality, priority, inclusivity). Suggested simplification: "that includes other species"]

"that transcends the human.]. Transcends, in this final clause, smuggles into the argument a new idea, because "to transcend" means "to surpass." The claim now, as this snake of a sentence winds its weary way to conclusion, is that the meaning that humans attach to things is greater than the humans who do the attaching. At least I think that is what it may mean.]

So after completing this investigation, I think that the claim is that literature projects ideas onto animals and also things. And sometimes these projections illuminate and enhance both things and animals. 

I'm exhausted. I had planned to discuss the Introduction at greater length, but I've had enough. Instead of proceeding with the introduction, I'm going to try to understand the chapter on Robinson Crusoe (a novel that I first read as a boy and have read several times since, and which I feel that I understand). Stay tuned.

 

 

[January 31]  Petal Rivera writes:  "So it seems that Brown's book is not a novelty of ideas, but a novelty of language."

[January 31] Sean R. Fine writes: "I agree with Ms. Rivera. Simple ideas cast in pretentious language to make them seem important. This emperor of literary criticism has no clothes. None whatsoever,"

[February 1] Joel Salzberg writes: "Vivian, good job of unravelling that sentence even though I still don't quite understand it."

{February 1] Viola Pilbeam writes: "Vivian, you're too kind. Why don't you just  admit that this whole book is absurd American nonsense."

[February 4] Helena Hotchkiss-Jones replies: "This absurdity can't be blamed on the Americans. It's as much the fault of Deleuze, Adorno, etc."]

[February 4] Joel Salzberg replied: "Who is Deleuze Adorno?" 

[May 2]  Evelyn Efflandt writes: "Joel, you always were a couple of candles shy of a menorah."

[May 3] Vivian de St.Vrain replies: "Evelyn, you always were a nasty bigot."

Cornell English Then and Now -- 3A

I am absolutely buffaloed by Laura Brown's book, The Counterhuman Imaginary (Cornell UP, 2023).

The title is a puzzle. Why does the adjective come after the noun? And what does the word "counterhuman" mean?  (One hundred and forty-six pages to go and I'm already off balance. I'm worried that if I can't understand the title I'm going to have a heck of a difficult time with the content.)

I took a guess that the coinage "counterhuman" would signify something monstrous or terrifying, like a vampire, troll or ogre. But I was not even in the ballpark. "Counterhuman," I have now discovered, is a term of art in contemporary literary criticism that refers to everything that is not human: not only animals, natural phenomena such as storms and earthquakes, but also "things" or objects -- anything that is constructed or manufactured. Not "inhuman' -- just not human. (But why "counter" rather than "non" human?)

Moreover, the word "imaginary," which I have for a lifetime understood to be an adjective signifying what is not material but rather a product of the human mind, as for example, art and literature and dreams, has also undergone metamorphosis. According to wiki, the adjective-turned-noun "imaginary" "is the set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols common to a particular social group and the corresponding society through which people imagine their social whole.” That's a deal of territory, but I think I understand: "imaginary" is essentially a synonym for what I might, naively, have called "culture." (Might an alternative to The Counterhuman Imaginary be The Culture of Things? It's a more inviting title and much less pretentious.)

But now I'm stopped in my tracks. The "imaginary, it appears, is "the work of a particular social group." How in the world, then, do the "counterhuman," who are incapable of thought, possibly generate "a structure of ideas?" Pots and pans and volcanoes and marmosets don't have brains that think or speak, except when we humans attribute such traits to them. 

In a whimsical moment, Duke Senior, in As You Like It, proposed that there are "tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones." Am I to understand that this author takes seriously what Shakespeare regarded as an ironic jokey extravagance? Gosh, I hope not.

I think I now get the point: Laura Brown, the prestigious Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell University, intends to defend a paradox. She will explain to me how non-humans, things without an intelligence, can create a culture. I'd better pay close attention. Or perhaps the author means to advance the trivial but more sensible and less sensational idea that humans can attribute culture to animals and things.

Nevertheless, I must say what's on my mind -- what a deliberately off-putting title. It's clearly designed to repel the general reader, someone like myself, and to speak only to coterie fellow-travelers who might understand either or both of the words "counterhuman" and "imaginary." Not a large potential audience.

Do I have a chip on my shoulder as I turn from the title to the Introduction. Yes, I believe I do.

 

[January 25] Marianne Morrison, Ph.D. writes:  "Vivian, you should not go on with this. Your so prejudiced against this writer that you cant give her a fair hearing."

[January 25] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Marianne, I'm trying my best to be fair and honest."

[January 26] Petal Rivera writes: "Vivian, I think you're naive to suggest a less pretentious title. I hate to say it, but the point is not to avoid pretense, but to be pretentious. No modesty in this book."

[January 27] J C Occhiogrosso writes:  "Vivian, you're being deliberately obtuse. C'mon, it's not so difficult."

[February 4] Vivian de St. Vrain responds:  "Ok, J C, if it's so easy, why don't you suggest a better title."

[February 12] Winifred A. Walker writes: "Like it or not, this is typical academic jargon. If you want to read this book, you must master the idiom."]

Words of My Life -- Poop

Nowadays, the ordinary meaning of the noun "poop" is feces. Perhaps because "poop" is a nursery word, it is apparently less offensive than "crap" or "shit." And yet less infantile than kaka or doodoo.

But "poop" did not refer to the work of the lavatory until about 1720. Nor do I remember it being in general use during my childhood.

I myself first encountered the word "poop" in the escapist seagoing novels to which I was addicted as an adolescent: the Bounty trilogy, the Hornblower series, Treasure Island, Mr Midshipman Easy, and the buccaneering books of Rafael Sabatini, Jeffery Farnol, and many many others whose names have been long forgotten. In these romantic novels, it was often the case that a handsome young midshipman and a pretty maiden, her golden hair cascading over her shapely shoulders, would flirt while leaning against the taffrail of the "poop." Had I known or suspected that "poop" carried stercoraceous overtones, my budding fantasy life would have turned to dreck. Thank goodness I knew nothing.

The poop deck, I soon deduced, was the roof of the cabin built into the aft of a sailing vessel. Why "poop?" From the French word for stern, poupe, itself derived from the Latin puppis (also signifying stern). Wherefore puppis? No one knows -- the word has no analogues in other ancient languages.

Shakespeare used the naval "poop" in the celebrated passage in Anthony and Cleopatra in which Anthony was greeted by Cleopatra. It's the epitome of classical conspicuous consumption as well as Shakespearean eloquence.

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them.

 

An impressively decorated vessel and a spectacular poop, which, because languages change and meanings shift, now provokes involuntary undergraduate titters. In truth, generations of teachers of Shakespeare have amused themselves with the notorious (or perhaps mythical) student blunder: "her poop was beaten gold." 

 

Other varieties of "poop." There's the poop that means exhausted, as in "I'm pooped." And poop as inside information. "I got the true poop on this." And poop as a useless or ineffectual person (thought to derive from nincompoop): "He's an old poop."  A party-pooper.

 

Shakespeare himself knew still another, and rarer, poop. In Pericles, a pander and a bawd discuss their need for fresh "creatures."  Their conversation is mighty vulgar.

 

Bawd:  The stuff we have, a strong wind will blow it to pieces.

Pander: The poor Transylvanian is dead that lay with the little baggage. 

Bawd:  Ay, she quickly pooped him; she made him roast-meat for worms.

 

Poop was also, it would seem, a slang term for the female genitalia. The Bawd has "denominalized" (as the linguists say) the word and converted it into a verb ("she pooped him)" that has the force of "infect with a venereal disease."

 

Certainly, the word poop has, over the centuries, done yeoman duty.

 

 

Other words of my life: try here.

Cornell English Then and Now -- 2

To begin my project of getting a fix on Cornell's Department of Literatures in English, I attempted to read Professor Jeremy Braddock's Collecting as Modernist Practice (Johns Hopkins, 2012). 

My plan is to read these Cornell contributions to knowledge with as much empathy and as little prejudice as I can muster.

Despite my good will, I got off to a bad start. The title of Braddock's book, Collecting as Modernist Practice, struck me as dispiriting and uninviting. It's an uncompromising coterie title that seems to say to me (and to every general reader), "I don't care whether you read this book or not." And indeed the copy that I borrowed from the university library had sat on the shelf unthumbed and pristine for the twelve years since its publication. Perhaps it's the minuscule typeface.

Collecting as Modernist Practice is not a page-turner. I found it rough going, and I now confess that I read closely only the introduction and one chapter -- and skimmed the rest.  Braddock studies the work of collecting and anthologizing art and poetry in the modernist (mostly 1920s) period. The chapter that I studied, The New Negro in the Field of Collections, was enlightening and I was glad to have read it. Braddock is an indefatigable researcher. Sentence after sentence is supported by extensive archival work and a plenty of footnotes. I do wish that the author was as interested in the art and mystery of literature as he is in literature's reception. Collecting as Modernist Practice might be more at home in a department of sociology. 

Braddock's prose style is awkward and forbidding. He loves long static sentences with complex subjects and predicates that are sutured with weak verbs. In the pages that I studied, I rarely encountered a metaphor or any other figure of speech. Braddock is also partial to newly-coined polysyllabic abstractions that he may think add heft to his thesis, but which in fact frustrate his readership: minoritarian, identitarianism, anthologization, narrativizing. On the whole, entirely too much suffixizationality.  

I will always be grateful to Braddock for introducing me to Witter Bynner's 1917 Spectra hoax, of which I was ignorant, and especially for acquainting me with the fabulous name of one of poets that Bynner invented: Anne Knish.

 

[January 13] Oksana Sartry writes:  "Vivian, I don't think that you're entirely fair to Braddock. It's true that his prose style is imperfect, but remember that the book is most likely his dissertation.  And for a diss. it's quite good. I also think that when he writes about poetry, he's quite thoughtful and insightful."

[January 13] Marianne Morrison, Ph. D. writes:  "Vivian, your too harsh about Braddock's vocabulary. Those words that you poke fun at are the regular vocabulary for people of his generation; your out of touch.  

[January 14] Oksana Sartry replies: "I wonder why Johns Hopkins published this diss. in its modernism series. Good diss., but immature book."

[January 17] Sean R. Fine writes:  "I'm interested in modernism, but frankly, this book is absolutely unreadable. Whatever value it has is buried beneath tons of jargon. Gives academia a bad name." 

 

Books I Read, 2024

Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls; Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep; Felipe Alou, My Baseball Journey; Guy de la Bedoyere, Gladius, the World of the Roman Soldier; Gordon Dee Alcorn, Owls; Martin H. Levinson, Brooklyn Boomer; J.N. Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin Language; Sybille Haynes, Etruscan Civilization, a Cultural History; Philip Freeman, Julian, Rome's Last Pagan Emperor; G & L Bonfante, The Etruscan Language, An Introduction; Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories; Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons; Ellen Gilchrist, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams; Kim Chernin, In My Mother's House; Ines Augrain Thomas, Memoirs of an 84 Year Old; Louise Penny, The Cruelest Month; Abramovitch and Galvin, Jews of Brooklyn; Helen Czerski, The Blue Machine, How the Ocean Works; Ian Buruma, Spinoza, Freedom's Messiah; Robert Leighton, Tarquinia, an Etruscan City; Joseph B. Solodow, Latin Alive; William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, Barry S Brown, La Signora Watson e I Segreti di Parkington Manor; Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli; Patrick Joyce, Remembering peasants, a personal history of a vanished world; Charles Darwin, Origin of Species (parts); Sean Sayers, The Making of a Marxist Philosopher, Leo Tolstoi, Anna Karenina; David Gibbins, The History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks; Lisa Kaltenegger, Alien Earths; Nicholas Kristof, Chasing Hope; William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing; Abdulrazak Gurnah, Other Lives; Mollie Gillen, The Masseys; Hibl & Hibl, The Handel Lamps Book;  William Shakespeare, King Lear; Caroline Dodds Pennock, On Savage Shores; Andrew Lipman, Squanto, a Native Odyssey; Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd; Lee Siegel, Groucho Marx; Ben Goldfarb, Eager, the Surprising Secret Life of Beavers; Robert Louis Stevenson, The Lantern Bearers and other Essays; Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness; Margarette Lincoln, London and the 17th Century; Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending; Mark Kurlansky, The Basque History of the World.

Deaths, 2024

The year got off to an early start when Brad Gombas died on December 16. Brad was the brother of my late brother-in-law Allen Gombas. I knew him in the 1970s, when he was a young man; he lived most of his life in New Mexico where he established a career as a builder and craftsman. I wasn't in touch except through the extended family communication chain. On December 26, my friend since  1965 Ray Pike died at age 90. Ray was an accomplished journalist. Nancy Pike and AGP were the young mothers in a playgroup that included the infants NGP and Nina Pike -- in an earlier life it now seems. We saw Ray and Nancy at least once a year for many decades. Then on the last day of the year Sue Palmer died (peacefully, I'm told), after many many years of illness and pain. She was a superbly talented artist and a friend, though not a close one, since 1969. In February, we lost Nancy Levitt. Not a close friend (wife of a colleague) but a long time acquaintance  -- a regular at the Takacs, seated just in front of us these past 30 years. Sheldon "Spike" Cohen, later Alan Mills, a friend from the PS 217 schoolyard, died in March. Esophogeal cancer that had metastasized. A long drawn out death, with many months of hospice care. In May. Bill Wood died. He was a world-famous scientist and a friend. It must be 20 years now since his wife, Renate Wood, a poet, left us. Bill had been in a relationship with another old acquaintance, Marilyn Krysl, for these many years. Marilyn died a couple of months after Bill; she had been in "memory care" for several months. During the summer, we lost two former English colleagues. The first to go was congenial Chuck Squier, at the age of 91, who had moved to Boise, Idaho to be near his children; he was a friend and also a long time neighbor on the Hill; the second: nice guy Doug Burger. In August I discovered that Anatol Anton had died earlier in the year. I knew Anatol when he was a member of the CU Department of Philosophy in the 70s or 80s, but hadn't been in touch since he left Boulder to return to San Francisco. Anatol was a cheerful bear of a man, far to  the political left, who grew up in Greenwich Village with a semi-famous painter for a father. Fred Litto, classmate from P S 217 and Erasmus, died in Brazil, where he had lived for 50 years; we always planned to get together, but it never happened. Another PS 217 friend, Tony Sogluizzo, died in the spring but I didn't find out about it until much later. He was a genuinely decent and gentle man who had a good career as a librarian. Late in December, we attended the dignified funeral of Bill Belew, husband of Lynn's friend Sharon Belew.  And so the year came to an end.  

 

Another Creative Dream

I'm aware that Oscar Wilde is reputed to have said that the most terrifying words in the English language are -- "I would like to tell about you my dream."  But I'm going to report on last night's dream anyway, because it's so bizarre and interesting (at least to me).

I'm sitting at a table in a restaurant with my ladylove. Actually, it's not exactly a restaurant; it's more like a nightclub of the kind that's familiar to me only from 30s films, not from real life. Small tables in a very large room, patrons wearing fancy slick clothes -- men in dark evening wear, women in shimmering white. Low chatter. Everything normal except that wandering among the tables is a giant African lion, male, with an intimidating mane and a long swishing tail. 

I say to my lady, "I don't like the looks of this. That lion could easily carry off a small child."  End of dream, or at least, end of what I remember.

Once again, it's clear that my nighttime self is far more imaginative than my pedestrian daytime self, who would never in a million years have thought to introduce a whopping big lion from the Serengeti into an ordinary restaurant. I'm not nearly so visionary. Does the dream have any meaning? An obvious interpretation is that even places safe for recreation can be dangerous.  Or, conversely, that dangers can be domesticated and made safe. Take your pick. 

My Life with Museums -- an Introduction

In the course of my long life, I've visited hundreds of museums -- more than I can possibly count or remember. Nor just the famous and glorious ones: how many times, driving in unfamiliar locality, or wandering in a new city, have I been irresistibly lured into the local landmark?  Even in the most modest establishment, there's something new to learn and discover. Nevertheless, my focus, lifetime, has been on art museums, where even the most iconic, most reproduced painting or sculpture acquires new life when viewed in the flesh. Let's face it: copies can be useful and informative, but the real thing is the real thing -- always revelatory, and sometimes transcendent or sublime. In fact, let me confess, in the Rembrandt Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, I experienced a transient version of the so-called Stendhal Syndrome. Once and once only, but never to be forgotten.

I'm dazzled, in memory, by the vast holdings of the Borghese, the Louvre, the Rijksmuseum, the British Museum, and an early love, the under-appreciated Brooklyn Museum right there on Grand Army Plaza.  

I'm grateful to the exhibitions and the hard-working curators that introduced me to major painters I wouldn't otherwise have appreciated: Aelbert Cuyp and Jan Steen at the National Gallery, Camille Pissarro at the Jewish Museum in New York; many more. And also the specialized museums, chief among them the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, which taught me more about life in the seventeenth century than could a fleet of books. And a special favorite, the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York -- a most wonderful and comprehensive display of an ancient and modern craft. But also the many local museums that I visited during my thirty-eight cross-country migrations. Who could ever forget the Donna Reed Museum in Denison, Ohio, or the Jell-O Museum somewhere near Buffalo, New York?  Gosh, I'm still hoping that someday I will make it to the National Museum of the American Coverlet in Bedford, Pennsylvania.

And then there are the troubling museums. I wonder if I will ever have the courage to enter the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. It was disorienting enough to visit an open-air museum, somewhere in Lithuania, where a variety of preserved structures from that country's miserable past have been brought together to simulate a peasant village. It was a strange dispiriting visit. After all, my ancestors as far back as we can know lived and worked in such a sad little village. My visit was, I suppose, educational -- but also melancholy and depressing. The village seemed not so much preserved as embalmed.

Words of My Life: the List So Far

My series of posts called Words of My Life was inspired by a Federico Roncoroni's Sillabario della Memoria, viaggio sentimentale tra le parole amate. Roncoroni's book is a unique and I think original kind of autobiography -- a history (voyage, he says) of words that have been been loved by him. Words of My Life is a  homage to Roncoroni. So far I've written brief essays on the following words (and I intend to continue). Just as is the entirety of the blog, these essays constitute an autobiography in shards and fragments. Here's the list of entries thus far. Each mini-essay is just a click away.

barmagillion

boobs

boot

bottom

cishet,

hack

fango

fluff

joint

jot and tittle,

mucilage.

nostalgia

orts

outing

pairings

pandiculation

provider

ramps

roux

sleepers

slouch,

 spatchcock,

stopper.

troll

 umpire, 

whores

worship

yips

 

Sleeping: a History

I'm a terrible, terrible sleeper. It's a lifelong plight and a serious disability. Truth to tell, I'd have more success as a contestant in a tango contest, or as a heldentenor yodeling in front of thousands, or as a trapeze artist or as a sumo wrestler than I have as a sleeper.

Bad sleeping runs in my family. I suppose that I inherited the trait from my father. Growing up, we never knew where we'd find the old guy in the morning, because during the night he'd wander from room to room and from bed to chair and even onto that scratchy old green tufted sofa. For me, the hardest part of any day has always been the night -- and, believe it or not, the problem has become more severe as I grapple with old age.

My usual routine is to fall asleep prematurely (and unwisely) at 10:00 pm. Then I wake at 12:30 am, usually in a fright from a ghastly nightmare, my brain alert, but my body yearning for oblivion. Then I'm up for a while, involuntarily reprising some atrocious embarrassment or shameful failure in some earlier part of my life. Unable to find the right situation for my ancient limbs, I twirl beneath the blankets like a rotisserie chicken. I don't want to disturb my peacefully-slumbering bedmate, so I wander the residence, finally to settle in an auxiliary bed. Then my wayward brain starts to ruminate on the state of the nation, especially on the prospect of a second term for the moronic demagogue. At this point, I reluctantly surrender to necessity and take a sleeping pill (the powerful hypnotic ambien). I read or watch a basketball game on the TV, but after about 45 minutes the drug takes hold and the muscles in my eyes slacken so much that I can no longer bring the separate images of right and left eye together. Eventually I fall into "airplane sleep" -- the kind of shallow surface sleep that we all experience when we fly "economy" or "coach" (better called "steerage"). At about 6 in the morning, I wake out a second horrid dream, relieve myself, and try to snatch a couple of peaceful hours --  a hope which I regularly fail to accomplish. Eventually, "the darkness has passed/ And it's daylight at last."  I'm foggy-headed for a while but at last I regain my equilibrium until it's time for another nighttime bout with Morpheus. And that's how I pass one third of my life. 

On the cheerful side, although I'm a bad nighttime sleeper, I'm a fairly proficient daytime napper. The most wonderful and memorable sleeps of my life have been afternoon naps. When I was in my teens, back there in the Eisenhower era, it was my weekend custom to trot to the schoolyard in the morning and play three-on-three half-court basketball for a couple of hours (in those days I enjoyed an endless "second wind"). Then I'd come home for a mid-day dinner -- perhaps if the parents were feeling flush it would be a roast beef or roast pork along with a bounty of potatoes (the most soporific of vegetables). Then I'd retreat to my room, tune the old wood-cased Philco to a Dodgers game, perhaps even to a double-header, and allow myself to be soothed by the rhythmic cadences of Red Barber and Connie Desmond. A deep, profound and most satisfying nap would then ensue -- the kind of sleep where you're so far gone that you don't know if it's day or night, summer or winter when, hours later, you crack an exploratory eyelid.

Where are the sleeps of yesteryear?

In my maturity, sleep has been, as I've said, a combat zone. In these last years I've achieved weekend afternoon depth just two times. Alas and alack, it was the drugs, the sedatives for my two surgeries that did the trick. When you're anesthetized, at least as I experienced it, there's nothing -- no sound, no dream, certainly no twirling -- between the moment the anesthetic kicks in and moment it leaves. You're just not there. You're nowhere.

The ancient formula was somnus imago mortis. That is to say, sleep is the simulacrum of death. Sleep is designed to prepare us for death. There was a time that I would scoff at such a pious formula -- but not any more. I think that if death is what I experienced during anesthetized sleep, why, then, there's nothing to fear. It will be peaceful and long and very boring, but not at all stressful.

I would like my tombstone to read, "No More Insomnia, Forever."

Words of My Life -- Outing

During my lifetime, the word "outing" has mutated beyond recognition. It first entered my youthful vocabulary (as did so many other words) through the medium of baseball. An "outing" -- in the old days --meant to me only a stint on the mound. "Podres has had a good "outing" today." The more general meaning of "outing" as a short trip taken for pleasure, such as a picnic, or a jaunt in the country, only came into my  life many years later. "They enjoyed a family outing to Montauk." The fact of the matter is that my family of origin didn't go on "outings," but at some point I must have heard I heard about such journeyings from friends or read about them in novels.

These days, I rarely encounter the baseball or picknicky meanings of "outing." "Outing" has transformed into the obnoxious word that describes the odious and hostile practice of exposing the sexual identity of a person against his/her will.  From picnic to nasty, alas.

Frankly, I prefer the traditional significations and activities.

My Life in Objects XIX: Bronze Door Plate

It's my newest acquisition, purchased on ebay just a couple of days ago, but already a favorite. It's a bronze door plate, very beautiful and heavy in the hand. It's inscribed PULL. It bears no manufacturers or identifying marks but the style is mighty pure Victorian. I imagine it came from a demolished once-elegant downtown department store. What the heck do I plan to do with it?  Why, it will be attached, next summer, to the old iron gate that we mounted at the entrance to the "waterfall garden." It's whimsical, of course, because while the gate helps to define the space, it guards absolutely nothing and is easily circumvented. 

If PUSH had been available I would have purchased it too. But PULL is sufficient. A plate saying NO SOLICITORS has also been proposed -- but that addition might be just a little bit of overkill (and silliness).

My Baseball-First Vocabulary

Folks who weren't there can hardly appreciate how thoroughly the nation and neighborhood into which I was born was baseball-saturated. In the 1940s and 1950s, the heyday of the fabled Dodgers, baseball was Brooklyn and Brooklyn was the world -- of this there was, nor could be, any doubt.   

Baseball was the all-encompassing medium though which we learned about success and failure, defeat and resiliency, exhilaration and sadness, and ultimately of the knowledge of good and evil.  

Not only morality, but language itself. It's an unimpeachable fact that my early vocabulary was solidly baseball-based. It took years and sometimes decades before I discovered that many baseball words also carried an off-the-diamond significance.

Readers may scoff at this claim to the linguistic priority of baseball -- because they can't imagine or can't believe how central pitching and catching was to our experience. So "let's go to the tape."

Take, for instance, the word "pennant." During my salad years, "pennant" was a common everyday word that meant only "league championship." If you finished  first in your league, you "won the pennant." I had not the least glimmer of an idea that a "pennant" was also physical object -- a flag, it turned out, usually triangular and usually nautical. To me, a pennant was immaterial and metaphorical. When Russ Hodges famously (to those of us of a certain age) screamed, in 1951, "the Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant," there was no reason for twelve-year-old me to suspect that the word had an extra-baseball existence. (Nor did I know that "league" meant anything but National or American, major or minor.)

Another such word is "battery," which to me and to my cohort of scruffy schoolyard friends meant nothing more than the duo of pitcher and catcher. "Today's battery is Newcombe and Campanella"; "they're facing the 'brother battery' of Mort and Walker Cooper." But later it came to pass that the word battery was known to the world beyond Ebbets as a source of electric power-- in those days lead-acid and now lithium. And that, in addition, "battery" had violent associations -- as in "assault and battery" -- or its military signification as an assemblage of cannons. (The word "batter" had already leapt its baseball perimeter. Thanks to my mother, I was early familiar with the tasty mixture that could be baked into cookies or bread). And "bat" was the old hickory or ash, not a flying mammal.

There are many other baseball words that migrated away from their first home. A "rubber" was a 4" wide strip of something -- was it really made of rubber?-- that lay on the mound just 60 feet and 6 inches from home plate. Later, a rubber became an eraser and then the material from which automobile tires are made and then, much much later, a condom. A "mound," of course, was first and foremost a pitcher's mound, not a geographical feature. A "dugout" was where players gathered when they weren't on the field; later it became a kind of canoe. "Stuff" -- some days a pitcher had his good stuff, but some days his sinker just didn't drop. A "stance" was a batter's pose in the box; some batters had an open stance and some a closed. "Clutch" did not denote holding tight to something or other; it meant only a "clutch hit". A "blast" was not a bomb going off; it was long four-bagger. The "count" was not degree a of knighthood; it was the state of balls and strikes on the batter.  The next batter would wait on a metaphorical "deck" long before a deck became a pack of cards or an exposed porch. A "blooper" was a "Texas leaguer"; only later did it become a flawed outtake. Strike! Three strikes and you're out. Later, a labor movement. And many more.

"Fair" and "foul" indicated where a batted ball fell to the earth in relation to the first or third base lines. Macbeth's "So foul and fair a day I have not seen" was many years into the future. 

More on Starokonstantinov

The (website) "My Shtetl -- Jewish Towns of Ukraine" gathers information about Starokonstantinov -- "Old Constantine" -- the town from which, in 1895, my courageous grandparents emigrated to America. The site is in Russian but it can be mechanical translated into awkward but intelligible English.

Some of my friends of European extraction have been able to return to the old country villages where their families originated, but that option is not available to me. Trust me, there's no pilgrimage to Starokonstantinov in my future -- even if the town happens to survive the Russian invasion and the rockets. My grandparents did not bring to Ellis Island happy memories and nostalgia or pique my curiosity with warm fuzzy memories of their earlier years. Nevertheless, Starokonstantinov provokes my curiosity. For how many decades did my ancestors live in this so-obscure-to-me town?  How did they manage to survive?

One of the compilers of the My Shtetl website, Yevgenii Schneider, has unearthed a report on Starokonstantinov written in 1884 by a certain N. I. Zuts, a lieutenant in the 45th Azov Infantry Regiment. Why or for whom these paragraphs were written I have no idea, but some of it largely duplicates information that I have previously posted. According to Lieutenant Zuts, Starokonstantinov was founded in 1505 as the village of Kolyshchentsy in a grant from the king of Poland to one Ivan Labunsky. On January 5, 1561, Labunsky's descendants sold Kolyshchentsy to Prince Konstantin Ostrozhsky. Three months later, Ostrozhsky was permitted by the king to found a city first called Konstatinov, then Novokonstantinov, and finally in 1632 renamed Starokostiantyniv. A castle was constructed in 1571. In 1620, the city passed into the possession of the princes Zaslavsky, and in 1682, to the princes Lubomirsky. Starokonstinov became part of Russia in 1793.

(It seems to be the case that Ukraine was a largely unpopulated or underpopulated frontier until a few hundred years ago. When and why did my people decide to try their luck on this vast semi-empty plain?) 

Zuts expresses frustration that it hard to count Jews because of "the special conditions of their life, which is generally distinguished by great mobility and inconstancy with respect to place of residence: in the city there are many Jews who live permanently or for a very long time due to their trade and other affairs and are not included in the city population. Jewish houses, not being the property of one person, and sometimes constituting the property of several families, cannot serve as data by which, even desirably, with a small error, it would be possible to determine the number of their inhabitants. When concluding marriages among themselves, many, even the majority of Jewish families, accepting a son-in-law for a year, two, three or even five years, depending on the marriage conditions and the son-in-law's property status, subsequently move to other localities."

 

The good lieutenant seems genuinely mystified by the communal customs of the Jewish population. Zuts admires one aspect of Jewish life: "the charity of the Jewish residents is expressed primarily in the fact that poor Jews receive help from the wealthier ones. Independently of this, there is a Jewish Hospital in the city, located in a house built with public funds and maintained with money donated by two wealthy Jews, Israel Epstein and Abraham Krasnoselsky."

 

And Zuts adds this very interesting detail of Jewish life. "All Jewish houses are built almost according to the same plan and the same model, having the character of a guest house, i.e. on both sides of the corridor there is a row of rooms; each room has a door into the common corridor and is also connected to the neighboring rooms by doors, mostly double-leaf. Consequently, each room has 3 doors and only the corner rooms have 2 doors." Zuts describes what is familiar to me as a "shotgun house" -- a style not at all rare in the new world but apparently exotic to the lieutenant.

The website also contains a few pictures of houses typical of Jewish inhabitants. As far as I can tell, these are recent photographs of older homes in various states of repair.

The website does not make it clear who, if anyone, is living in these houses today.

In addition, Evgeniy Schneider appends a brief history of the Jewish community of Starokonstantinov. I've transcribed it.

"Jews have lived in Starokostiantyniv since the end of the 16th century. In 1629, there were 130 Jewish families (about 25% of the total population), and the community was the second largest in Volyn. During the Khmelnytsky period, the Jews of the city and the surrounding area took refuge in the fortress. On the Ninth of Av, the Cossacks broke in and killed everyone. Starokostiantyniv was also destroyed several times by the Haidamaks in the early 18th century. But Jews continued to settle there, and in 1765, 1,801 Jews were registered in the city and its surrounding area. In 1802, the number of Jews was 2,053. In 1827, when Tsar Nicholas I issued an order to mobilize Jews into the Russian army, serious unrest broke out in Starokostiantyniv. In 1847, there were 6,611 Jews in the community, and in 1897, 9,212 (60.7% of the total population). Most of the local Jews were Hasidim, followers of the tzaddikim of the Chernobyl and Sadagora dynasties. In 1911, the city's population was about 20,000, including 11,800 Jews. With the establishment of Soviet power in Volyn in 1920, the Jewish community was disbanded. By 1926, there were 6,934 Jews in the city (41.3% of the population). There was a secondary school with instruction in Yiddish.
At the end of 1931, there were 4,837 Jews in the city (about 33% of the population), of whom more than a quarter were deprived of the right to vote ("disenfranchised").  The Germans occupied Starokostiantyniv on July 8, 1941. In late August 1941, the Jews were confined to a ghetto. The Jewish population of Starokostiantyniv and its environs was exterminated in a series of actions from August 1941 to November 1942.  Today, the town has a small Jewish community, "Shalom." In 2012, it had 80 members."  A tragic story.

 

The website posts another picture that intrigues me. It's an old photograph, probably from the the turn of the last century, of Jewish workers in what is called a "cigarette factory." I know that when Isaiah came to America, in 1895, he made his living rolling cigars. I just wonder if he followed a trade that he had begun in Starokonstantinov. Would he, perhaps, have recognized any of these contemporary, doomed Jewish workers?

 

My Aunt Mollie

This post is written for my children, grandchildren, and any potential future descendants. Aunt Mollie was an important person to my in earlier years. She should be remembered.

Mollie was my father's older sister. She was born in 1900, the third of the four children of Isaiah and Eta. She was an extremely private person and never revealed the least personal information about herself. I know nothing of her childhood and I am not even certain that she attended high school. I know that she was for many years employed in the surgical instrument field, where she advanced to a responsible management position and earned a reasonable salary (for those days). She retired early, perhaps in her fifties. She never married nor introduced me or anyone else in our family to a boyfriend, lover, or suitor, though in later life I learned that it had been her constant habit to visit a "Mr Isgin" every Wednesday. Who was Henry Isgin? I believe that he was a fellow worker at her place of employment and I know that when he died he willed Mollie his Long Island City house. That's all I know; I hope that her relationship with him was satisfying.

Mollie's curly black hair never grayed. Her eyes were so dark that there was no visible distinction between iris and pupil. My daughter, who knew her only in her last years, remembers her as small, squarish, and big-bosomed.

Mollie never "moved out"; during my childhood, she lived with her parents and later with Eta only in a small ground-floor apartment at 334 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights. When Eta died in 1963, she moved across the river to a her own place at last, a modest apartment in Greenwich Village, where she lived until her death in 1985. She enjoyed the concerts and the theater and her independence. She was a solid New Yorker; like my father, she never learned to drive an automobile. Unlike my father, who was uncomfortable outside his familiar sphere and was averse to travel, Aunt Mollie was an adventurous sort. She traveled the world, usually solo. She was constantly on the move. I heard tell, for example, that she was a passenger on one of the first commercial flights to China (in the 1930s).

In 1952, she offered to take me on a trip to Washington DC. I jumped at the chance. It was my first time out of Brooklyn and quite the revelation: gosh, there were other cities, other neighborhoods in the universe! We stayed at the Mayflower Hotel (gosh, there were hotels!), ate in "restaurants" -- another novelty -- visited the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, and even took a boat ride up the river to Mt. Vernon. We heard Harry Truman deliver a Fourth of July address from the base of the Washington Monument. It was exhilarating and inspiring -- a first toe-in-the-water alternative to my very marked provinciality and to the exaggerated caution of my parents. I am sure that I would never "gone away" to college, or relocated to the Rocky Mountain west, or traveled to other continents if it hadn't been that Aunt Mollie introduced me to the world outside the P S 217 schoolyard in my thirteenth year.

Mollie also helped me financially. She wasn't rich but as a single woman with a good income she accumulated enough cash to intervene, generously, at critical moments. In a sense, she was the family banker. She gave me a couple of thousand dollars for part of the down payment on the Hackett Hill property and later held, on favorable terms, the mortgage on my house on 10th Street. When she died, she bequeathed me the remainder of the principal.  Although these were not great sums, they were nevertheless very crucial to me and to my family's financial well-being.

Even more important: Mollie admired and, I believe, loved my wife -- which was a very good thing because my own mother was not so positive.

I can't say that I ever had a real conversation with Mollie. She asked little and told less. She was not curious, or thoughtful, nor well-educated -- not even a reader. She was always a little crude and could be critical and blunt (though not to me). To my brother, when he was going through a tough period in his financial life, she said, "Why don't you just get a real job." To a niece, she offered, "Why don't you just lose weight."  A true Victorian at heart, she regarded all illnesses as mental and moral weakness.

Mollie was proud of her extraordinary vigor and health. She once told me that she went 40 years without seeing a doctor. She was robust and middle-aged at 84, dead at 85 -- every one of her organs having failed. Loss of mental acuity was the first sign of decay. In 1984, she called my father on the telephone and said, out of the blue, "Pop is here."  Dad said, "What do you mean Pop is here. Pop died in 1946." Mollie answered, "Yes, I know that. So why is he here."  After that shocking moment, the end came quickly.

I' have never visited my parents' graves, but I'm told that Mollie is buried on my father's right and that my mother is buried on my father's left. So Dad lies forever between the two women to whom he was closest in life. 

Words of My Life: Bottom

"Bottom" is another of the many words that came into my life through the medium of baseball. As soon as I was able to walk and talk, I learned that an inning has both a "top" and a "bottom." "Bottom of the ninth" was an optimistic phrase because there was always the Ebbets Field hope that the Dodgers might come through with a game-winning rally. Later, when I discovered that there was more to human existence than baseball, the various and colorful meanings of "bottom" began to reveal themselves. For example, the posterior part of the human body, which I knew as the ass or the behind or the tuchas, was, I learned, called the "bottom" by people of sophistication. A euphemism?  A Britishism? 

Even later on, I discovered that bottom, signifying buttocks or butt was not the root meaning of the word but a metaphorical extension of its original sense. Old English botm, cognate with Latin fundus, meant land or farm or soil. This meaning of "bottom" is well-preserved in the phrase "bottom land" -- the level and fertile acres along the banks of a watercourse. Many English family names are consequently topographical surnames of ancient inhabitants of various river fronts -- such as Bottoms, Robottom, Higginbottom, Ramsbottom, Longbottom, Winterbottom, and Bottomley. Names that have nothing to do with either innings or asses.

The oddity that "bottom" can refer both to farmland and to the human butt can sometimes yield unconscious comedy. For example, in 1977, I was a guest at a wedding in the infelicitously named Kent village of Pett Bottom. I must hope that Pett is a variant of Pitt, a "hollow," rather than commonplace "pet" with a supernumerary "t".

These days, "bottom" is more likely to mean something like "the essence" -- as in such phrases "to get to the bottom of the matter"; or "the bottom of one's heart."

And then there's egregious Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, who does not disdain the mandatory pun: "This is to make an ass of me."

Shakespeare likes the word "bottom." Here's Malcolm's most memorable characterization of Macbeth.  

 

                          I grant him bloody,
Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,
Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin
That has a name: but there's no bottom, none,
In my voluptuousness: your wives, your daughters,
Your matrons and your maids, could not fill up
The cistern of my lust, and my desire
All continent impediments would o'erbear
That did oppose my will:

 

This "bottom" is not farmland or butt; it's the low point in a downward trajectory. This "bottom" is associated with "cistern" -- a receptacle for holding water.  Curiously, Shakespeare regularly uses the word in its relation to the water of oceans, most specifically the sea-bottom:  

 

            the slimy bottom of the deep.    (Richard III)

 

O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love! But it cannot be sounded; my affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal.  (As You Like It)

 

By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap,
To pluck bright honor from the pale-faced moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,
And pluck up drowned honor by the locks.  (I Henry IV)

 

As is the ooze and bottom of the sea. (Henry V)

 

Who ever yet could sound thy bottom? find
The ooze, to show what coast thy sluggish crare
Might easiliest harbour in?                                   (Cymbeline)

 

 

I suspect that Shakespeare would have savored the modern phrase, "bottom feeder."  But I doubt he would have understood, any more than I do, the names of the fifth and sixth quarks, which are top and bottom (exactly like an inning).

 

Other words of my life:  slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage. spatchcock, umpire, stopper.

My Onion Heart

Last night I woke from a dream with this peculiar phrase repeating itself in my half-conscious brain: "it fills my onion heart with fear and trembling."  

I have a couple of questions to ask of my capricious dreamatorium, which although obviously capable of creating passable iambic pentameter is rarely self-explanatory.  

a) What is "it?"  What is the nameless dread that precipitated this piece of blank verse, and b) what in the living heck is an "onion heart."  And why am I accused of having one?  Is an "onion heart" pungent and tasty, when eaten either raw or sauteed?  Or is it constructed of layers of scales and therefore mysterious and perhaps unknowable.  

Frankly, I don't have a good theory, except to say that I don't feel that to be described as having an "onion heart" is complimentary. If my dreamatorium wanted to say something nice about my heart, it had such relevant and easily available alternatives as "lionheart" or "braveheart." Or even "sweetheart," for goodness sake.

Driftin'

Every once in a while, I experience something that I call a "cultural convergence" -- perhaps an event reported in a daily newspaper that closely resembles something on the very page of the novel that I happen to be reading. A cross-genre overlap, let us say.

Here's in example of such a coincidence that amused me much.  

Yesterday evening I watched the classic western The Magnificent Seven (1960) and this morning I read, once again, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. It's hard to believe but yes, there is a very brief moment where two such very distinct works brush against one another.  

Unlike TN, The Magnificent Seven is a violent spectacle that steers clear of humor, or subtle characterization or extensive dialogue. After the climactic concluding battle to preserve the Mexican village has been both lost and won, the two surviving gunmen share a moment before trotting off on their separate ways. Chris Adams (Yul Brynner) inquires of Vin Tanner (Steve McQueen) if he has a plan for what comes next. Laconic Vin, cowpoke and gunslinger, responds, "driftin'. 

In Twelfth Night, there's a similar question and a similar answer, but in a far different idiom. Antonio asks Sebastian, who has survived a shipwreck, about his plans. Sebastian's view of his future is essentially the same as Vin's, but there is none of that "ah shucks" minimalism in his reply. Instead, Sebastian responds, "My determinate voyage is mere extravagancy."  

[While Vin's one-word answer is clear as clear can be, Sebastian's "mere extravagancy" requires a bit of a gloss. Nowadays, "extravagancy" (usually "extravagance") signifies a "lack of restrain in purchasing luxury goods." Not so in 1600, when "extravagant" remained much closer to its root etymological inheritance. The word descends from L. vagare, "to wander." Extra-vagance therefore means something like "wander beyond." Here's a more familiar example of the word at work: when Roderigo characterizes Othello as an "extravagant and wheeling stranger," he does not criticize Othello for spending too many ducats on his fancy get-up. He means that he's a rootless and wandering non-native. (Wheeling? my dictionary glosses wheeling as "roving, wandering, drifting"). And also: "mere" did not then connote triviality; its meaning is closer to "pure." "Determinate" meant and still means "decided.")

Therefore Sebastian's sentence --"My determinate voyage is mere extravagancy" -- is directly equivalent to  Vin's "driftin''". Cultural convergence at its best.

It's just two ways of talkin'. 

I sometimes wonder about Shakespeare's intent here. Why did he bother to put such a difficult sentence in Sebastian's mouth? For purposes of characterization, certainly. But at the expense of clarity. Wouldn't it have been more economical, more transparent, for Sebastian to say something plain, such as "I don't have a plan, I'll just wander." It's certain that some percentage of Shakespeare's audience, perhaps most, will not grasp the meaning  of the sentence as written and will be left puzzled. Yet as he so often does, Shakespeare preferred eloquence to transparency. 

In my opinion, Shakespeare delighted in his own fluency.  And sometimes I think that Shakespeare wasn't just writing to be heard by his Globe or Blackfriars audience. He was writing to be read and studied --  although I doubt he could have imagined a future in which his sentences would be glossed with crowded inches of small-type footnotes.

It it possible that Shakespeare also had an inkling that, as Beethoven once put it, he was writing for "a latter age?"

Amnesia on Film: Crossroads (1942)

 

Just when you think that the cistern of amnesia films has been drained dry, along comes this entertaining oddity from 1942. In Crossroads (1942), French diplomat David Talbot, played by William Powell with William Powell's unvarying mustache and accent, contracts a very bad case of movie amnesia. "Retrograde amnesia," it's denominated. He can't remember anything that happened before his years-ago accident, and although he seems to have lived an exemplary life since, he's subject to a vicious blackmail attempt by a trio of blackguards who try to convince him that in his earlier life he was a career criminal. After many a twist and turn, all is revealed and set right; however, Talbot never regains his memory but goes blithely along with his personal history obliterated. This lack of resolution is unusual and perhaps unique for amnesia movies but the filmmakers seem unconcerned about the psychological effects that the huge gap in Talbot's self-knowledge ought rightly to afflict him. Once again, movie amnesia is unmoored from any remote approximation to real life.

 

Powell's principal antagonist is played by Basil Rathbone. My favorite scene in the movie is one in which Powell and Rathbone are pictured profile-to-profile. Both actors have truly outstanding, near cyranoesque noses and I am sure that the director framed the scene to emphasize their nasal symmetry. Powell and Rathbone go nose-to-nose for a few long and very amusing moments. I can't find a proper picture but this one is close (that's glorious Hedy Lamarr between the two olfactory eminences).

Othello (1604), Nora Prentiss (1947), Date Night (2011)

Many years ago, in what sometimes seems like an earlier life, I taught Shakespeare courses to both young and "mature" students. When we reached Othello, halfway through the semester, I would, of course, point out that the play did not take the traditional form of tragedy-- of a great man or king gone awry as in the case of Macbeth or Richard III. Othello instead introduced a formula that was innovative for its time but which has become commonplace in ours. Othello is a domestic drama in which a marriage falls all to pieces. I liked to tell my captive audience, only slightly facetiously, that the whole of life is divided into two parts: the comic, which begins with birth and ends with marriage, and the tragic, which begins with marriage and proceeds to death. A statement which is a kind of shorthand, simplified version of a cliche of criticism. Like many such abbreviations, this formula contains a dollop of truth. Othello in fact begins with a marriage -- or more accurately a defiant elopement -- and comes to conclusion with Desdemona strangled in her bed and her husband the Moor a suicide. It's the sole play of Shakespeare's that follows the strict marriage-to-death path, although Romeo and Juliet is comic until the secret wedding but becomes tragic afterwards, while the wondrous Winter's Tale begins with Leontes and Hermione already married and pushes through some desperate circumstances only to come to a miraculous comic climax with the restoration of a woman presumed dead and a glorious second-generation wedding. Both RJ and WT sometimes seem like two different and opposite kinds of plays condensed into one -- and yet are all the more triumphant for being so.

These musings were precipitated by the film that we watched a couple of nights ago -- Nora Prentiss (1947), which Wikipedia characterizes as a film noir, but which is better thought of as two films in one -- a film that starts as an instance of domestic drama or "bourgeois realism" or even soap opera and doesn't become a murder mystery until two-thirds along the way. In a limited sense, it's not unlike Shakespeare's hybrids, but alas does not successfully yoke or blend its disparate plots. As a result, the last section of Nora Prentiss, I'm sorry to say, becomes not intriguing but unbelievable and ludicrous. It's an odd and interesting film, although not a good one, but it's worth watching for aficionados of TCM not only for its manipulation of genre expectations but also because it is one of a large group of films that are so very common and ordinary in twentieth-century America where such enormous value is attached to a happy and fulfilling marriage -- and to the disappointment that arises when the marriage comes a-cropper. In Nora Prentiss, a midlife couple with a pair of kids, who live in an orderly picket-fence house, ought to be living a happy life, but, by golly, both husband and wife are discontented and bored. They are afflicted with the whole package of suburban anxieties. It's Cheever-land or Updyke-land: demanding children and divorcing friends, the stultifying daily routine, the unsatisfying jobs, the dull obligatory social events, and especially the lack of sexual excitement which is signified in these Code-burdened movies by the gulf between the twin beds and the sterile head-to-toe sleepwear and also by that pathetic chaste kiss before husband and wife turn away from each other as they extinguish the cute matching bedside table lamps. Gosh, it's a scenario that is familiar from dozens and perhaps scores of postwar (and later) films. 

Melodramatic Nora Prentiss follows the fortunes of steady-Eddie Dr. Richard Talbot, enacted by Kent Smith, who meets nightclub chantoosie Nora, played by Anne Sheridan. Flirtation turns into an affair, and the affair evolves into true love or at least into genuine sexual passion. But all goes from bad to worse when Talbot, instead of seeking a divorce from his stern unlovely wife, concocts a dumb whopper of a plot that makes Friar Lawrence's harebrained sleeping-dram waking-up-in-the-tomb plan seem brilliant in comparison. Talbot fakes his own death and disappears -- causing the film to turn police-procedural. And then, through a series of hard-to-credit mischances and gimmicks, Talbot finds himself in his newly assumed fake guise indicted for murdering -- oh no yes indeed! -- his very own self. Nora Prentiss by this time has metamorphosed into a film that by rights should be renamed City of Naked Death or Shadow of Evil Night. Even so, the film might have been salvaged had not so much depended on the acting skill of Kent Smith, who is perfectly fine in the first part of the film, but incapable of managing the switch from reliable doc to nervous fugitive. It's not entirely his fault: the role puts too much pressure on the actor. I doubt whether such a transition could have been handled by Roscius or Burbage or Garrick or Sir Laurence Olivier himself.

Here is a picture of Ann Sheridan and Kent Smith. Sheridan wisely holds on to her hat; Smith's chapeau dominates the scene; very 1940s. 

Here's another still. I am in utter disagreement with Kent Smith's pencil mustache. It's a mistake. He wears it when he's a straight suburbanite and shaves it off when he goes underground -- an infranasal situation highly out of synch with the psychological trajectory of the film; by rights, he should have been clean-shaven when he was domestic and hirsute when he was a criminal.

 

 

Just to bring these ramblings to conclusion, I should add that the evening after we watched Nora Prentiss, we gambled on a newish HBO film called Date Night (2011) only to experience a moment of extreme cultural convergence. Once again, a suburban couple (this time Steve Carell and Tina Fey) are stuck in a boring suburban marriage --  same sheaf of symptoms as in Nora P. They jointly decide to liven things up and before push comes to shove, they find themselves in a big city world of traditional noir tropes: mistaken identity, guns and gangsters, police on the take, a corrupt mayor, deserted dark buildings, death threats. Date Night even flirts with old archetypes: in order to renew themselves, the couple must pass through an underworld (not Hades this time, but the criminal underworld) where Acheron is played by a lake in Manhattan's Central Park). It's not credible, of course, but then, it's not meant to be so.

 

 

No mustaches this time, I'm glad to say. But just like RJ and WT, two films in one.

 

Amnesia on Film: Black Angel

[Warning, metablogians: do not read the following paragraphs if you're planning to see Black Angel, a curious, interesting 1946 noir. Your viewing pleasure will be ruined by the following "all spoiler" entry.] 

Once again, it's amnesia, Hollywood style -- an alcoholic blackout that is granted a patina of respectability when a doctor calls it Korsakoff's syndrome. The plot in brief: a whiskey-soaked amnesiac (Martin Blair, played by Cornell's own Dan Duryea) has just plain forgotten that he murdered his bad-girl blackmailing wife.

I must say it's a difficult premise for me to swallow -- but is nevertheless the kind of oddity that's par for the course in the Hammett-Chandler-Woolrich universe.

To add to the complexity, forgetful Martin sets out to find the killer, and is hot on the trail when his memory suddenly returns -- and in a flash he realizes that he himself is the guilty party for whom he's searching. It's a mighty contrived and out-of-left field kind of revelation -- but I must confess that I fell for it. I was deceived by a series of red herrings and was surprised by the film's outcome. I rather doubt that most viewers will be as much a sucker as I was. 

Like many noirs, Black Angel gets off to a very fast start. Scarcely thirty seconds in, Mavis Marlowe (Constance Dowling) opens a bureau drawer and retrieves her nice ladylike pistol. I respect a movie that's thoroughly and instantaneously loyal to its genre. I wonder, though, whether future generations, studying those many black-and-white crime films of the 1940s and 50s, won't think that every chest of drawers, armoire, lowboy, highboy, tallboy, dresser, and chiffonier in Los Angeles or New York City harbored an easily accessible derringer, rod, gat, or piece.  

 

Shadowlands (1993)

Recently some much-admired old friends recommended a movie called Shadowlands (1993). They pledged that we'd love it. But we didn't. In fact, we regarded it as a film that lacked value and integrity. Of course, we won't mention to our friends that we responded so negatively and that we now question their esthetics. I'm sorry but it makes me uncomfortable to doubt people whom I otherwise respect.

But gosh was this Shadowlands a pretentious stinker! It transformed into pure soap opera the peculiar relationship between novelist and religious apologist C. S. Lewis and his fan/correspondent Joy Davidman. We were not entranced by the "white marriage" of a reserved, asexual Oxford don and a smart down-to-earth Jewish-turned-Christian New Yorker. But the odd couple hardly had time for an idyllic picnic on the banks of a picturesque stream before Joy developed a terminal cancer, at which point the movie transitioned from merely dismal to full bore lugubrious, perhaps because the director relied on the "Pause Meaningful" (also called the "Soulful Two-Shot") for much of his effects. 

Joy Davidman was played by Debra Winger, who had died of cancer ten years before in Terms of Endearment (1983), so she was on familiar ground when pale and wan in a hospital bed. 

With such a story, a director should make every effort to avoid turning his film into a tear-jerker. Not this director, not this movie. Shadowlands ended with a shameless climax in which Lewis (Anthony Hopkins) indulged in prolonged tears, sobs, and theatrical snuffling. The old manipulative formula: if you want to make your audience cry, make your leading man weep. 

Over the course of Shadowlands' static 131 minutes, I found myself longing for old-fashioned movie action. If not a car chase, at least a mad dash --with a couple of fender-benders -- to the hospital. Perhaps Hopkins, excluded by a Nurse Ratchet from Winger's hospital room, might have gained entrance by breaking a window in an adjoining room and tip-toeing across a narrow ledge, twelve stories high.  And instead of yet another tepid scene in the college's common room, how about letting Hopkins punch a fellow don right in the kisser. Anything but another long shot of an o-so-green meadow and purling brook.

What We Read in the Fifties: East Side, West Side, by Marcia Davenport

Two weeks ago, I wrote some admiring remarks  about a little-known post-WWII film called East Side, West Side. I said then that I was sufficiently impressed and intrigued by the film that I intended to read the novel upon which it is based, but that since ES,WS has evaporated into the mists of time, I would have to wait for Interlibrary Loan to dig up a copy for me. Well, the novel has arrived, coming haste-post-haste from Laramie, Wyoming, the flyleaf inscribed, "To Mrs Eccleston, from Anna." Gosh, I'd love to know who Mrs. E and Anna were, and what they (and Laramie) made of this extremely Manhattan-y book. 

East Side, West Side (published in 1947), I can now report, is a big hunking doorstop of a novel. Not a very good one, I'm afraid. It is prosy, untidy, and crammed with too many episodes and too many undifferentiated characters. To transform its meanderings into an economical screenplay required great intelligence and imagination. All praise to the screenwriter, Brooklyn's own Isobel Lennart, who condensed characters, eliminated subplots, rationalized excesses, and to some degree toned down the book's inherent snobbery. 

ES,WS can be described as an old-fashioned "woman's novel," and not in a good way. Its female characters are, almost uniformly passive victims. Plus there's far too much chat about makeup, dinner parties, and "fittings." There's an old --very old-- canard that an erotic novel for women consists of 400 pages of courtship and foreplay  followed by a proposal of marriage. I'm afraid that ES,WS fits this unfortunate formula. Jessie Bourne, wronged and soon-to-be-divorced wife, is wooed by gentlemanly General Mark Dwyer but o so slowly. Sex is teased and deferred for chapter after chapter. In Isobel Lennart's alert and improved script, women are not afraid to take charge. 

There's one episode in the novel that seriously rankled me. There's a murder. The privileged East Side aristocrats do not turn the guilty party over to the police; instead, they suppress evidence and suborn perjury in order to keep the scandal out of the newspapers. They succeed, though their plot couldn't have deceived the dullest precinct flatfoot. In the film, I'm glad to say, a killer is brought to justice.   

Toward the end of the novel, Marcia Davenport introduces a long embarrassing digression in which the General, just returned from the European theater, lectures on the post war situation in Eastern Europe. I'm sorry to say that he praises Soviet aggression in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, etc. I suspect that these tortured apologetics were written before Davenport lived in Prague and was engaged to marry the Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk, who in 1948 was thrown out of a window by agents of the KGB.  I hope that Davenport would have changed her position after the defenestration.

Title Your Own Film Noir

Here's a game. I've compiled a list of essential "film noir" nouns and adjectives. Your job is to assemble them into the titles of noir films.

Nouns: city, death, shadow, night, fear, heat, murder, crime, kiss, street, gun, thief, window, sidewalk, body.  Adjectives:  naked, black, evil, strange, wrong, lonely, raw, secret, violent, sudden.

Using an adjective and a noun is good: e.g. Dark Shadow, Strange Gun, Violent Window, Raw Heat.

Three words is better: City of Naked Death, Shadow of Evil Night.

Four words is triumphant: Secret Shadow on Crime Street, Dark Kiss at a Strange Window.

Beware, though. Some of the combinations you assemble might already have been used (Body Heat) -- or previously parodied (Naked Gun).

 

[January 5. Pearl Maneli writes:  Vivian, how could you have forgotten "blood."  Blood on the Sidewalk, Evil Blood; Murder by Blood, etc.]

[February 5.  Elio-Per Limano writes: How about Secret Fear?]

[February 6. Amber Bernstein writes: Crooked? How about crooked?

East Side, West Side (1947)

How should a person who is an enthusiast of classic cinema react when he finds himself loving a film that has been panned, dismissed and ignored for seventy-five years? 

The movie in question is a Manhattan tale called East Side, West Side. It was released in 1947 when I was a mere eight years and has sunk like a stone. It's a domestic drama (or soap opera) for two-thirds of the way and then goes full noir in its last thirty minutes. If East Side, West Side is remembered at all, it's for squandering big-time talent: actors Barbara Stanwyck, James Mason, Ava Gardner, Cyd Charisse and Van Heflin; writer Isobel Lennart and director Mervyn LeRoy. I cannot remember a picture from that era that is studded with more stars.

In The New York Times, Bosley Crowther, the grand khan of 1940s movie critics, not only hated the film but was driven by it into a kind of moral uproar. "East Side, West Side," he wrote, "just about hits the low-water mark of interest, intelligence and urgency. And certainly nothing accomplished by the writers or the actors of this film does anything to raise it into an even remotely vital realm.... Frankly, we thought that films like this one had been put on the dud-list years ago." Yikes. Even though Crowther almost popped an artery writing his review, he was not explicit about what so offended him. Let me guess: "films like this" focus on frank sexual desire and more specifically with adultery and its consequences.  

East Side West Side has rarely drawn much comment, but in 1991, when other noir-y films of past eras were being re-evaluated and upgraded, this one was still considered "static" and "lurid, unconvincing and artificially chic...." In a word, "uninteresting melodrama trash."

And yet the two of us found it engaging and vital and not in any way lurid.

The plot is loaded with familiar post-War II elements. Brandon Bourne (James Mason) is married to well-to-do Jessie Bourne (Barbara Stanwyck) and has recently ended a too-public affair with ex-waitress Isabel Lorrison (Ava Gardner). Isabel left town and Brandon returned to his forgiving wife, but now the ex-"hash-slinger" is back in town and wants Brandon again. She gets him, way too easily. Jessie puts up with her husband's shenanigans for a while but eventually leaves him. Meanwhile, Mark Dwyer (played by the great underrated actor Van Heflin), who is some sort of spy/journalist/all-around good guy, returns from Europe and immediately falls in love with Jessie. At this point, the movie suddenly veers from its domestic track. Isabel is murdered and Brandon accused of the crime. Dwyer, turned detective, comes to his rescue.

It's an episodic but not unworthy plot. But there's more to the film than this brief summary. Here on Walnut Street, we fans of TCM appreciated elements of the film that Bosley Crowther, and many other viewers, had left curiously unexamined.

ES, WS declares in its title that it's going to explore class tensions and antagonisms. The well-known formula is that dwellers in the east side of Manhattan are patrician, rich, and snotty, while the west side is inhabited by down-to-earth working-class plebeians who are rough but joyful. The film both elucidates and challenges the cliche. Brandon Bourne epitomizes what would now be called "upper class privilege." He's rich (probably inherited money), accustomed to servants and to getting his way. He carries himself as though he was born in tux and tails. He loves his wife Jessie, he repeatedly claims, but there's no warmth or snuggling or flirtation between the two of them, which is the film's way of implying that she's cold and that he's not getting enough at home. (That's the way things are on the Upper East Side, don't you know?) On the other hand, there's ex-waitress Isobel Lorrison, who covets East Side wealth and who is overtly sexual; she's an orgasm waiting to happen. She covets Brandon's life of ease as much or more than he wants her passion. She has no compunction about introducing her eager sexuality into the Bourne household, all the better if it pollutes their establishment complacency and fancy dress.

Even though ES, WS gives us James Mason at his slimiest and Van Heflin at his must buoyant and likable, it is a film that is dominated by its female characters. It offers us five-count'em-five strong women, all of whom exhibit gobs of what has lately come to be called "agency." Jessie (who finds her strength only in the penultimate scene) and Isabel, of course, but also Rosa Senta, played by Cyd Charisse, a young woman who makes a very good decision; Jessie's mother (Gale Sondergaard), who has the best scene in the film, when she tells Brandon to his face that he's a vain and a fraud; and also Felice Backett, played by Beverly Michaels, a dame who is "built like the Empire State Building" and who is not afraid to throw a punch. Some of the best dialog in the film (and there's a lot of good stuff) is between women who are either the closest friends or the most bitter antagonists. There is, for example, a striking confrontation between mistress and wife:

Isabel Lorrison : Sorry I'm not more subtle. But, you must remember, I haven't had your advantages. When your mother was busy being the Great Lady of the theater, mine was in a burlesque show on 14th Street. And when your mother sent you to Miss Cavanaugh's School for nice, young ladies, I was slingin' hash! Oh, you learned how to pour tea properly and how to cross your legs at the ankles only - and that plain pumps make you a lady, but, putting bows on them make you something else. You learned how to make a good marriage. But, like all your kind, you think by marrying a man, you've done enough. Well, there's one thing that Miss Cavanaugh forgot to teach you. Something I learned: how to keep a man. How to keep him wanting you!

Jessie Bourne : My husband doesn't want you. He's finished with you. He told me so last night.

Isabel Lorrison : I'll call him and he'll come running.

That's classy writing. 

The women are not the only vibrant and credible characters. There's also Bourne himself, who is an exemplar of what would now, decades later, be called "sexaholism." He wants to be faithful, or at least says he does, but he can't help himself when Isabel Lorrison/Ava Gardner has a telephone in her hands. Whether he's ill or just weak and pathetic is left to the audience to decide.

And by the way, the film was written by a woman (Isabel Lennart) who adapted it from a novel by Marcia Davenport -- a writer well known in her day but long forgotten. The novel has been out of print for decades, but Interlibrary Loan has located a copy for me. It's now "in transit' and I'm waiting impatiently for it to arrive. 

 

Amnesia on Film: The Majestic (2001)

Alas and alack, I've now known far too many folks who have endured serious memory problems. As a consequence, I seem to have developed an interest in amnesia not only in real life but also in fiction and film. There are many many books on the subject and Wiki offers an astonishing list of 234 Hollywood amnesia films -- some of which, judging by their titles, do not appeal to my mature taste and which I promise never to view -- including such not doubt remarkable productions such as Raft of the Dead, Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City, and A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon.

I sometimes imagine that there are fewer actual cases of loss of memory than there are films on the subject.

Literary amnesia is a recent obsession; while the ancients had their Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, I can't recall amnesiacs wandering lost around Athens or Rome. Shakespeare never wrote an amnesia play, though at one point Lear, who's had a rough go of it, asks "Who is it that can tell me who I am?"

I suppose that we moderns put amnesia front and center because we are concerned with the integrity and the continuity of the self. Loss of memory threatens us; no memory, no identity. But let us not forget that amnesia is a cheap and easy all-purpose convenient and superficial no sweat plot device. The formula: loss of memory = mystery; restoration of memory =  anagnorisis. Very little thinking required.

The Majestic is an eccentric unsatisfying fairy tale that provides the usual car crashes but also lost love, the FBI, HUAC, and an art deco movie theater -- all in the Capraesque context of small-town standards versus big-city corruption. Pete Appleton, played by an uncharacteristically subdued and expressionless Jim Carrey, falls into what is depicted as a total global amnesia. He lacks the least glimmer of his past life. In "real life," any human forced to cope with such an experience would suffer from anxiety, shock, disorientation, fear, and worry -- but not so in this slice of hollywoodiana. Amnesiac Pete is calm and patient, because he is rooted not in our communal vale of woe but in a movie tradition where amnesia is ordinary and effortless. Don't worry, folks, he'll recover his memory by the last reel. No big deal. And he does.

Once again, amnesia is a disease like none other. 

Dodge City Nincompoops

The rip-roaring conclusion to Dodge City (1939), is marvelously dumb. The bad guys, led by really nasty villain Jeff Surrett (Bruce Cabot) have jumped out of the burning railroad car and onto their horses. They are going to make a getaway, we assume. But for some reason, the six schmegeggees don't ride away from the railroad tracks. Instead, they continue exactly parallel to the tracks, allowing Wade Hatton (Errol Flynn) to get out his rifle and pick them off, one after another.

All that the black hats needed to do was to hang a right and ride off into the brush, or just rein up, and let the train go by. The train is on a railroad track.  But no. Not these guys. They keep on riding alongside the train until they're all shot. End of movie, but not the end to my astonishment. I'm baffled that the director, Michael Curtiz of all people, allowed such a brainless ending. 

Also: Errol Flynn, with his anachronistic 1930s mustache and condescending smile, was so goody-goody and upstanding that I felt a strong urge to piss on his leg.

 

Amnesia on Film: Whirlpool (1950)

Just when I was beginning to think that the Hollywood memory-loss well had run dry, along comes Whirlpool and another variant of the world's most flexible mental affliction. This time: loss of memory by hypnosis.  

It could have been a good film: Ben Hecht, Otto Preminger, Gene Tierney, Jose Ferrer. But it's gimmicky and the psychology is vulgar pseudo-Freudianism. 

Malignant David Korvo (Ferrer) hypnotizes poor Ann Sutton (Tierney) into imagining that she's committed a murder. Will she recover her memory in time for the true murderer (Korvo himself) to be discovered? Yes, she will. The film turns into something like a police procedural but might better be called a psychoanalytical procedural. Richard Conte plays the Tierney's husband, and he's the psychoanalyst, but frankly he's so surprisingly dense that he's an embarrassment to his entire profession. The audience is led through a series of melodramatic twists and turns, many requiring wholesale suspension of disbelief, before all turns out well, or pretty well, because poor Ann Sutton (Tierney) is reunited to her doltish husband.  

Here's a picture of Iago-like hypnotist Jose Ferrer staring into the deer-in-the-headlights eyes of luminous Gene Tierney.

 

Amnesia on Film: The Right of Way (1931)

Amnesia is perfunctory in this "pre-Code" melodrama. Comes and goes without much stress.

Rich snotbucket monocle-wearing attorney Charlie "Beauty" Steele is beaten, thrown into a river and presumed dead. He is rescued and wakes up without a glimmer of memory but is otherwise entirely functional. In his new, raccoon-skin-hat personality he falls in love with shopkeeper Rosalie Eventural (played by 18-year-old Loretta Young). Eventually it comes to light that he has left a wife behind. His memory returns in flash and in a flashback, and things go from bad to worse. Bigamy and all that.

The Right of Way has not aged well. It's a silent film with words. Conrad Nagel, acting in a superseded tradition, is all exaggerated gestures, eye rolls, and heavy lipstick. Loretta Young is so young that she hasn't even started to look like Loretta Young.

Astonishing to think that the film is now pushing a hundred years old and that amnesia was there right from the start. Before the start, actually, because there were two silent Right of Ways (or Rights of Way) before this all-talkie version.

Rio Bravo, Total Embarrassment or Great Triumph?

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We watched the 1969 western, Rio Bravo, and were crushed with disappointment. How could a film with such famous actors, directed by Howard Hawks (Red River 1948), amount to such piffle?  We could not restrain ourselves from jeering at its flagrant, grotesque failings. A thin, cliched plot, pieced out with obvious meaningless padding. Incoherent, contradictory notions and "themes." An unconscionable reveling in mass slaughter -- the bodies of Nathan Burdette's gang falling as thickly as the leaves in Vallombrosa. We adjudicated what seemed like a contest: who is a worse actor, Dean Martin or Ricky Nelson?  (Martin plays a drunken former gunfighter (named Dude!!) whose shaky hands can only be stilled when the Mexican band plays his favorite tune!!! Honest to goodness!!) Nelson is a ridiculously young hotshot gunslinger who would have been better off staying home drinking his afternoon milk and cookies under the supervision of Ozzie and Harriet. 

We hooted, I'm sorry to say, when impassive reluctant John Wayne kissed Angie Dickinson with all the passion of a man sucking on moldy lemons. We were offended by the racist caricatures of the Mexican innkeepers. And we guffawed when the film allowed both Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson to burst into song -- utterly violating their screen characters but perhaps throwing a sorry bone to the ticket-buying audience. (Allow me to confess that we fast-forwarded through the musical interlude.) The irrelevant crooning lost the film any remaining pretense or shred of integrity.

In short, here was a film that had no reason for being, or so we thought. A travesty, a mere catchpenny.

Baffled, we turned to the internet for the story. Because there had to be a story. 

And now comes the surprise. Rio Bravo was the second highest ranking western in the 2012 Sight and Sound critics' poll. Robin Wood, a generally trustworthy critic and the man who wrote the book on Howard Hawks, rated it as his top film of all time. What's going on here? We though the film was ludicrous and embarrassing; others think very differently. Are we completely out of touch? Are we nuts, intolerant. Has our taste been vitiated by age and mental decay? Are there beauties hidden the film that are sufficiently subtle that our grosser intellects could not detect them?  Or does this would-be emperor of a film lack clothes and the critics and journals and the tomatoes are all blinded and deceived.

And now comes some more internet info, which may or may not explain the opposing views of us and them. 

"The film was made as a response to High Noon," says Wikipedia. Why? Because High Noon was thought to be a leftist movie, an allegory for Hollywood blacklisting, as well as a critique of McCarthyism. John Wayne called High Noon "un-American." (I've always thought of it as quintessentially American;  what could possibly be more American than a Quaker's turn to violence, as when Amy Kane picks us a rifle and shoots one of Frank MIller's kin. And especially when that turn to violence is portrayed as a step toward a higher morality.

I'm wondering whether the folks who praise Rio Bravo like it not for aesthetic but for political reasons. I'm suspicious.

Next step: get my hands on Robin Wood's book on Howard Hawks. Stay tuned, Metablogians.

Female (1933)

Here's a colorized illustration of Ruth Chatterton as Alison Drake in the "pre code" romance Female (1933).   

 

Although she's surrounded by a bunch of official looking executives, she runs the show. Miss Drake owns and manages factory that manufactures automobiles. She's in a male preserve -- it's not a cosmetic factory or something more traditionally feminine. And she loves the work and the power.

 

The film might have been called Alison Drake but no, it's Female -- and therefore claims to describe not just one individual woman but an entire gender. Does it? At best, the film is mighty confused -- and at worst, reactionary in the extreme.

 

In the first half of the film, Alison Drake is not only an extremely competent executive, but she's also sexually liberated. It's her habit to bring home attractive men, seduce them, and, if they get the least bit soppy, transfer them to the Montreal office. She's one happy --although heartless -- "cougar." Then she meets her match in the person of young handsome (before he grew that silly little mustache) George Brent, who responds to her advances by saying, "I was hired as an engineer, not as a gigolo."  All of a sudden, Miss Drake goes all weak in the knees, falls in love, and decides to marry the man. She puts him in charge of the factory and plans to stay home in order to achieve the apotheosis of femininity by having "nine children."

 

The disappointing ending seems to be pasted on rather than organic. Many a film in the Code era set out to challenge the "tune of the time" but threw in the conventional towel because of the Hays Office. Female is disappointing because it voluntarily chooses to go all squishy when it wasn't necessary.

 

Here is Ruth Chatterton on her submissive and symbolic back.

 

George Raft. Why?

TCM, the indispensable channel, has been delivering us a raft of old George Raft movies. They Drive by Night (1940) of course, but also such unmemorable noirs as Johnny Angel (1945), Race Street (1948), and I'll Get You (1952) as well as a couple of others so unsubstantial that, although viewed during the past month, they've already evaporated from my tired old brain.

This last while, whenever a George Raft picture began, we'd set a challenge: will Mr. Raft's face show an expression? Any expression! Will he smile, smirk, pout? Will he be angry, contemptuous, happy, lustful, disappointed? Anything at all, any human emotion? After painstaking study, I can now report that although we've examined every single frame, slowly and carefully, not once in any of these films has George Raft exhibited the slightest discernible human feeling. Moreover, on even more diligent examination, I can now affirm that he has delivered every single one of his memorized lines without the least variation in speed, volume, pitch, or intensity. Every sentence, no matter its significance, exits his mouth with the exact same cadence. It's all low affect, all the time. 

It's a puzzlement. What was George Raft's appeal? Certainly not his skill as a thespian. Nor his negative charisma. He's not handsome, and because of his oddly short legs, he walks funny (and he walks at exactly the same speed when crossing the nightclub floor to question a "canary" or when prowling a dark alley, gat in hand. 

Even more astonishing -- in a couple of these movies he's cast as a romantic lead who gets the girl in the last scene -- a girl who is younger, prettier, taller, and a much better actor. There's nothing more embarrassing or impossible-to-take-seriously than a George Raft kiss and fade. The End.

George Raft with Ella Raines.  

Amnesia on Film: The Secret Fury (1950)

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There are amnesia movies and there are gaslighting movies. The Secret Fury is both, and, I'm sorry to say, it fails to hit two separate marks.

A bad bad lawyer and cadre of hired subordinates contrive to gaslight rich Ellen Ewing (Claudette Colbert) into believing that, while amnesiac, she killed a man. In any recognizable universe it would be impossible or at least extremely difficult to persuade a sensible, mature woman that she suffers from a loss of memory. Not in NoirThrillerMysteryLand, where amnesia is just about as ordinary as a case of summer sniffles. So Ellen takes the amnesia bait and gets herself consigned to a mental hospital until her boyfriend David McLean (Robert Ryan), who is not the swiftest, finally figures out what's going on, and after a frantic fistfight, rescues and vindicates his lady.

I myself was thoroughly confused by the multitude of loose ends in the plot. Who was it who strangled the hotel maid, played by Ethel Mertz aka Vivian Vance? And why? 

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, who hardly liked anything at all, was more-than-usually outraged by this film. He called it "wantonly unintelligible" and "cheap and lurid trash." I rarely agree with BC, but in this case he he went easy on The Secret Fury. I was equally infuriated -- The Secret Fury is a film without a shred of integrity. But what's to be expected when a phony case of false induced amnesia is at the heart of the matter? 

I feel for Philip Ober, who put his heart into playing the villain and was forced to mouth with a straight face some of the most ludicrous dialogue ever composed. I feel also for Jane Cowl, a graduate of Erasmus Hall High School, who played bland Aunt Clara. Jane Cowl had a long career and appeared in many respectable films. This one is an embarrassment.

So is the crowded, unartistic poster.

Deadline at Dawn (1946)

Some very serious contributors to film art created this almost forgotten whodunit. Deadline at Dawn was adapted from a novel by Cornell Woolrich and the screenplay was written by Clifford Odets. Cinematography was by Nicholas Musuraca and direction by Harold Clurman. That's some pretty good bloodlines. Moreover, the principal roles were played by young, sparkling Susan Hayward and by the always reliable Paul Lukas.

 

I found it a fascinating film and, strange to say, quite original. Original?? When almost all the plot elements come directly from the vault of overused noir tropes and cliches? Yes, a murder is perpetrated in the first scene. And guess what? We the spectators are kept in the dark and only see the killer's back and hands. And, oh no, an innocent man is accused of the murder and has only a few hours to prove that he didn't do it. But as luck would have it he falls in with a worldly-wise young lady who undertakes to help him and with whom, you can bet the house, he's soon going to fall in love. There's also a "bad girl" who does a little in the blackmail line. And a tough, excitable gangster who several times pulls a revolver out of the breast pocket of his vividly checked suit jacket. There are not one but two car chases. And a shrink-wrapped pair of deep-dyed red herrings. A pair of not-so-bright police detectives. Believe it or not, the film digs so deep into the treasury of cliches that it brings up a brief episode of -- gasp-- amnesia.

 

Nevertheless, these predictable elements are deployed in genuinely surprising ways. I confess that I was taken by surprise by twists and turns in the plotting and I never had the least clue that the wise old cabbie would play so important a part in resolving the mystery.

 

Deadline at Dawn defies the genre -- a bit. In 1940s murder mysteries, it's taken for granted that American society is massively corrupt and venal to the core. Everyone is on his own and everyone is on the take. But it's not so in this film. The young sailor who is accused of murder is a decent, upstanding patriotic young man. The woman who comes to his aid pretends to cynicism but turns out to be as innately noble as he. The various minor characters whom Alex and June encounter during their hunt for the real killer are uniformly kind. There's a newsstand owner who returns to Alex the wad of cash that falls out of his pocket; a fruit seller who joyfully packs for Alex a bag of bananas; the nervous guy who acts suspiciously but is only worried about his dying cat; the apparent stalker who turns out to be a harmless eccentric; the "super" and his wife sitting on the stoop who appear to be hostile but help June find her way; the policemen who come to the aid of the drunken baseball player; the blind pianist who turns out to be not villainous but just unhappy; and especially, the philosophical taxi-driver who sacrifices himself to help Alex. The blackmail and the murders are overlaid on a culture of decency, so that the upbeat conclusion seems to be organic and natural rather than a mechanically-attached Hollywood ending.

 

I suspect that the supporting cast of thoughtful kind working-class stiffs is the contribution not of Woolrich but of Odets.

 

Who would have thought it?  A noir whodunnit with a heart of gold.

Yellowstone

We watched the first season of Yellowstone (eight episodes, or about 350 full minutes, all told). It's not our usual fare, but because a close relative, an accomplished actor, has just contracted to appear in Season Four, it seemed important to investigate. Yellowstone sustained our interest but in my opinion it's mighty derivative. I think the title should be changed to The Sopranos Go West. The principal character, played by Kevin Costner, isn't precisely a Mafia don, but he's modeled on one. He owns a Rhode-Island-size slice of Montana and he protects his property with gangster tactics. Like Tony Soprano, he fights with his family, feuds with his consigliere, corrupts public officials, strong-arms his enemies, and doesn't hesitate to bribe or ice his opponents. Yellowstone creates a nasty dog-eat-dog Hobbesian universe that offers only an occasional redeeming event and, among a huge cast, only two or three sympathetic characters.

Yellowstone is not at all pastoral. The spectacular western landscape is brimful with events common to gruesome noir and urban crime films. In the episodes we watched, two tourists fell from a cliff and splattered, a woman was impaled by a steel fence post, a teacher who tried to intervene in a playground scuffle was accidentally struck to the ground and developed a brain hemorrhage, a cowboy trying to leave his job was shot in the head and his body dumped in a ravine, a new Yellowstone employee was branded on the chest with a red-hot iron, a woman was crushed to death by a horse, two brothers-in-law were shot and killed in a gunfight, a 10-year-old boy was stranded in a culvert with a rattlesnake twice his size, a real estate developer was kidnapped and hanged, and a meth house blew up and burned its occupant to death. I didn't keep a running tally of the various atrocities so there were probably a few that I've forgotten. 

We're hoping that our relative has a continuing part in the series (he's supposed to play a doctor), but we're fearful that he'll be on screen for a minute and a half before he gets his throat slit or loses a limb or two to an enormous John Deere harvester. We won't know for a year.

Crime of Passion (1957)

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Kathy Ferguson, played by reliable Barbara Stanwyck, starts out as a tough, no nonsense witty newspaper woman not scared to go toe-to-toe with her male superiors. She's a 1930s kind of liberated movie gal who wants a lot more out of life than a husband and kids and an avocado-colored refrigerator. She's on her way -- even managing to finagle an offer from an NYC newspaper. But then she falls in love with Lieutenant Bill Doyle, an LA cop (Sterling Hayden) and her admirable backbone goes all squishy. Now her only ambition is to stay at home, cook and clean, and make her man happy. What a betrayal! How implausible!

 

She lands in a dull 1950s suburb where her circle of female acquaintances talk about their outfits and their clubs. It's Eisenhower-era conformism, caricatured, and Kathy is bored silly.

 

Then the film changes direction once again, and Kathy, channeling, I suppose, her earlier ambition, transforms into a noir-y "bad girl" determined to advance her husband's career by whatever means necessary -- in this case, by means of adultery and murder.

 

Crime of Passion covers a lot of ground both in genre and in human psychology. One critic says "it's both dated and progressive at the same time" -- which is correct and is a lot more polite than describing the film as "confused" or "irresolute." 

 

I myself found Kathy's metamorphosis easier to swallow than her sexual attraction to Sterling Hayden's boss, played by hulking Raymond Burr. 

"Negative Bouyancy"

Mogambo (1953), directed by John Ford, is an eternal-triangle story in which earthy Ava Gardner and prim Grace Kelly compete for white hunter Clark Gable. Unfortunately, it's less engaging as a romance than as a travelogue -- it offers spectacular footage of African megafauna (hippos, giraffes, lions, gorillas, etc.).

Whenever I watch classic films set in "the colonies," I'm fearful that the native people will be exoticized and orientalized and trivialized, but I'm happy to report that Mogambo is less offensively Tarzanish than most -- setting aside a couple of embarrassing "fakelore" episodes. I would have been even happier if the Africans weren't just animated wallpaper -- bearers or rowers or dancers or spear-throwers -- and that they weren't depicted as entirely subservient to their white overlords. Mogambo is based on Victor Fleming's pre-Code Red Dust (1931) -- a much more sensual film than Mogambo and one which allowed Jean Harlow lots of room to wink and flirt. It's most odd that the glamorous sexy hunter in both Red Dust and Mogambo is played by Clark Gable - a rare example of filmic auto-reprising. He's hyper-masculine, at age 30, in Red Dust but in Mogambo it's too too obvious that his hair has been dyed a shiny black. When he pounces on Ava and Grace and mashes their mouths with unpersuasive 50s kisses, it is taken for granted that both ladies will immediately grow weak in the knees. 

I grew even less Gable-dazzled when I discovered a weird anecdote in Donald Sinden's recollection of the filming of Mogambo. (Sinden played the part of Grace Kelly's spineless, intellectual, oblivious husband). Sinden reports that (prepare yourself to be stunned and disillusioned): 

before leaving camp on the first morning [of shooting] I had been told to report to the hair-dressing department's tent, where I found the make-up men armed with electric clippers: 'I have to remove the hair from your chest.' 'Whatever for?' I asked, 'Orders.' It transpired that Clark [Gable], whose chest was completely devoid of hair, had always insisted that no other actor should appear on film exposing a hirsute breast. This included any member of the crew not wearing a shirt as well. He considered it a slight on his masculinity.

Surely, this is one of the most bizarre anecdotes in movie history. The King of Hollywood, the legend whose mere presence famously set roomfuls of maidens all a-quiver, was so sexually insecure that he required mass depilation of cast and crew! Follicular fragility! Big-time nuttiness?   

Question: was it in Clark's contract that he had the right to dictate the degree of chest shagginess of cast and crew -- or was he just throwing his weight around?  Suppose Sinden or some sweaty best boy had refused the electric clippers. Would the production have ground to a halt?   

It's well known that since the time of Samson and probably before, male hair has been associated with strength, but even Delilah didn't set out to defoliate every man in Gaza.

But Clark Gable's chest hair insecurity is only Donald Sinden's second most curious anecdote. Even more astonishing, at least to me, is that Sinden suffered from "negative buoyancy." Negative buoyancy is a condition in which a person is unable to float in water. In Sinden's case, negative buoyancy was discovered, he says, while filming a shipwreck scene in The Cruel Sea (1953). Sinden started to sink and was rescued from drowning by his co-star Jack Hawkins.

Almost all human beings float. Bob like corks. I don't, and neither did my father nor my male descendants. As a family, we're sinkers. I don't know why, except that perhaps we have an eccentric specific gravity or because our swim bladders go on the fritz, like sick fish. We regularly and uniformly plunge to the bottom, like a stone or a heavy lump of lead. 

How wonderful to know that there is a dignified name for our peculiar family trait: "negative buoyancy."

And now we can be consoled that we're not alone. 

There's got to be a support group for the negatively buoyant out there, somewhere.

 

Stranger on the Third Floor (1939)

 

Should I encourage my friends to seek out this film or should I warn them to steer clear?

 

Stranger on the Third Floor is one of many works of art that are more historically important, more influential than they are good or pleasing. With a thin plot, obviously padded, it moves along as slow as molasses. The main character, the focus of much of the action, is played by John McGuire who is so unredeemably incompetent and amateurish that you can't keep your eyes off him. And yet, like it or not, Stranger on the Third Floor is seminal -- acclaimed by knowledgeable folks as the first true noir, the head and font of all those 40s and 50s black-and-white films featuring betrayals, gumshoes, bad girls, corrupt city officials, errant bullets, dream sequences, flashbacks, low angle shots, deep shadows and Elisha Cook Jr.

 

In Stranger, two count-em two different men are accused of murder and are in jeopardy of getting the chair until rescued by the loyal girlfriend.

 

The director, Boris Ingster (Boris Mikhailovich Azar from Riga by way of the Moscow State Jewish Theatre) brought Eisenstein's style and German Impressionism to Hollywood. Peter Lorre (László Lowenstein from Rózsahegy, Hungary and Vienna) brought genuine maniacal creepiness to the part of the villain. 

 

Stranger on the Third Floor is gold for noir enthusiasts -- but dross for the casual film tourist.  

 

Margaret Tallichet is luminous as the girlfriend. What a shame that she retired after making only four film appearances!

"In This Our Life" -- the Novel by Ellen Glasgow

In this Our Life, the novel by Ellen Glasgow is richer, deeper, and less bound by convention than the film.  Film Life follows the inherited story for its first forty-five minutes but then sharply diverges.

In the film version, bad daughter Stanley is less conflicted and complicated a character and eventually devolves into a stereotypical noir "bad girl." Novel Stanley doesn't drive Peter to suicide, nor does she she bring the film to convenient closure by driving her car down a cliff. Novel Craig is far less worthy and more passive than film Craig and doesn't redeem himself by transforming into a sleuth who exonerates Parry.

Needless to say, the novel offers no Hollywood ending; in strong contrast, novel Roy rejects Craig's offer of marriage because she knows that Craig is still carrying the torch for Stanley. Instead, she tries desperately to leave town and start life anew -- but it's not clear whether or not she will make a clean getaway. We hope that she will.

The most extensive revision is to the character of the sisters' father, Asa Timberlake. In the film, he's a uxorious martyred browbeaten milquetoast who is the long-suffering caretaker of his hypochondriacal bedridden wife. In Ellen Glasgow's novel, much of which is seen through his eyes, Asa loathes his wife, knows that he's wasted his life, craves affection, and even admits to himself that he wants her dead so that he can be free. It's Asa, not Craig, who unravels the mystery of the automobile accident. Moreover, glory be to the proper gods, Asa has a secret lady friend, a widow/farmer a dozen years his junior, whom he visits on his occasional day off. And he nurtures an escapist fantasy that keeps him sane -- he wants to end his life as a simple farm laborer. He doesn't quite get there at the novel's end, but there's hope. Kaye, his very healthy, very appropriate mistress (we think sexual partner, though Glasgow hedges) assures him that she will always have an opening for a hired hand. 

Pitfall (1948)

Pitfall is just shy of sensational. Error and evil intrude into a normal postwar American suburban family. Jay Dratler and Andre de Toth, writer and director, hit all the necessary film noir notes but without descending to cliche. The beautiful blonde, is, for once, neither a temptress nor a gold-digger, but a decent, troubled young lady; the private eye is not a lonely warrior for justice but a brutal stalker; the police are not jerks; the wronged housewife is not simple and materialistic but strong and resilient. Moreover, the plot is not predictable and its ending neither pollyanna-ish nor disastrous, but balanced, credible and inconclusive. There are no car chases. 

Lizabeth Scott, Jane Wyatt, and Raymond Burr are terrific; Dick Powell is, alas, Dick Powell. 

Amnesia on Film: The Third Day (1965)

I don't know why, but It's surprisingly common, in movieworld, that if a man stumbles away from an automobile accident, he must cotract amnesia and he must suspect that he's murdered someone. On top of that, it's required that he will take full ninety minutes to prove that he is innocent of killing anyone. The Third Day hits these notes right down the middle. But The Third Day is not just an amnesia/murder mystery/police procedural. It's also a soap opera/marriage-on-the-rocks movie; it's a save-the-small-town-factory from corporate raiders story. And it's a maniac-on-the-loose horror film. The Third Day is a crowded conflation of genres which doesn't quite succeed in finding a concord to its redundant discord.

The first ten minutes are the best. Steve Mallory, played by George Peppard, returns to pre-amnesia life only to discover, and be dismayed, that he's a lout, barroom brawler, a drunk, and a womanizer. Peppard is perfectly cast because "baffled" is his default expression. It's his gift.

Sally Kellerman, later Hot Lips Houlihan, is the vamp. Arte Johnson, later Laugh-In's Wolfgang is the maniac. Herbert Marshall has the worst role of his career, but if there were a lifetime achievement award for finger-acting, he would win it. Robert Webber is the detective hot to prove that Steve Mallory is guilty, but he should have been more empathetic because earlier that same year he had himself suffered a full ninety minutes of amnesia in Hysteria (1965).

I could almost bring myself to admire this picture. It's well-paced, well-directed, beautifully photographed, mysterious in parts; a couple of luminous supporting roles. It flagged somewhere half way through. So did I. 

Amnesia on Film: Hysteria (1965)

Another automobile accident and another hospitalized amnesiac. Once again, the poor guy might have committed a murder, but he's not sure. And once again, there's a loyal young woman (Gina McConnell, played by Jennifer Jayne) to help him reconstruct his past. As well as a beguiling dangerous femme fatale and a double-dealing psychiatrist. Knockout drops, hallucinations, an escape through a window, a clever detective, a disappearing corpse, multiple flashbacks. The usual stuff, another day at the noir office.

The gimmick this time: Chris Smith (Robert Webber) has recovered his memory but keeps up the pretense so he can solve the murder. Everyone is kept in the dark, including the befuddled audience. It's a tricky move and highly unpersuasive. The last line of the Wiki plot summary tells you all you need to know in the way of cliche: "Chris is reunited with Gina." 

Amnesias on Films: Two in the Dark (1936) and Two O-Clock Courage (1945)

I've now reported on thirty-two separate amnesia movies and there are surely many more out there to which I am unacquainted. Why so many? How come Shakespeare didn't write an amnesia play? Why are there no classic novels about amnesia? Didn't unsuspecting folks get themselves bopped on the head in previous centuries? Didn't knights ever fall off their stallions and thwack their helms and beavers?

Here's an obvious answer to the gimmick's popularity: amnesia provides three of the major elements of all story-telling: Mystery, Quest, and Identity (or as Lear puts it, "Who is it that can tell me who I am?") But why is it repeated so obsessively in film?

Today a twofer, bringing the grand total to thirty-four. In Two in the Dark (1936), an amnesiac (Walter Abel) comes to awareness on a street corner and suspects that he has committed a murder. Rest easy; he didn't do any such thing. But he needs the help of a good-looking out-of-work actress (Margot Grahame) to establish his innocence. His amnesia is garden variety, "bang-bang". One blow to the old bean and he forgets who he is; later a second whomp and it all comes back in a flash (in the form of a flashback). Very convenient, very tidy, but not very imaginative. The film is languidly paced, almost slow-motion.

Curiously, Two in the Dark was remade nine years afterward as Two O-Clock Courage with the director of the earlier film serving as the producer of the later. It was a good idea to try again, because the later film was directed by Anthony Mann, who keeps things brisk. Although the plot and a great deal of the dialog was copied wholesale, it's a much better and different film, mostly because the amnesiac's fellow investigator is now a wise-cracking female taxi-driver -- a character straight out of the screwball comedies. When she's on screen, the film becomes a feast of badinage. Tom Conway as the amnesiac is dignified and expressionless, but Ann Rutherford steals the show as the fast-talking cabbie. 

"Bang-bang" or "thwack-thwack" amnesia arrives and departs easily. It comes with an on-off switch. Contrary to human psychological experience, it leaves no residue except for a couple of neat Band-Aids -- one on each side of the head.

 

 

Ann Rutherford and Tom Conway.

Ten Things I Dislike about Films

I'm a movie lover, but I'm not indiscriminate. Here follows a list of common movie occurrences that compel me either to seek out nineteenth-century novels or force me to bury my head under the blankets. 

1. Cute puppies, especially when the boy and the girl kiss for the first time, and the director, unfazed by cliche or rank sentimentality, cuts to the pooch's just darling head-tilt. Even worse when the doggie covers his cute eyes with his cute paw. Aaargh.

2. Child actors, with rare exceptions. Some few gifted children know how to be natural, but most just make me cringe. 

3. Gratuitous killing of "redskins," especially when aestheticized. How gracefully, when shot by the cavalry marksmen, do the Comanches plummet from the face of the cliff or tumble down the scree. In Western after Western, they take huge losses -- presenting themselves as targets while they ride crazily around the circled wagons -- a strategy that is cinematic but nonsensical. And also: all the retrogressive, antediluvian blackface and yellowface and brownface stereotypes that make us gasp with horror at our racist forebears.

4. Those far too frequent scenes, where the guy, pursued either by the police or the husband, goes out the 16th story window of his hotel and works his way across a narrow ledge to another window (always unlocked). Such scenes give me the willies.

5. Car chases. Boring, boring, boring. I've discussed this in the past.

6. Montage dating scenes: boy and girl meet cute. After the mandatory misunderstanding, they reconcile, and then we see five seconds of them sitting in a restaurant, smiling; next they're rowing in a boat in the park; then they're on a ferry, or at a picnic etc. etc. From this we are supposed to deduce that they're in love. Predictable cut to the predictable soft-focus bedroom. Romance, which ought to be thrilling, becomes, through repetition and want of originality, almost as boring as a car chase.

7. Funny drunks. They're not funny. Alcoholism is a destructive disease. 

8. The scene in which the stoic hero has taken a bullet in the shoulder and it's going to be extracted by an amateur. No anesthetics. "Here, bite on this." Even worse, if possible, when it's not a bullet but an arrow.

9. Background music that dictates the emotions we are supposed to feel. Worse still, the background noise that is currently so fashionable. Not music, just a loud drone, which sometimes drowns the dialogue.

10. Zachary Scott

Also, movies adapted from cartoons: Batman, Superman, etc. Horror films, designed to scare the pants off you. I can't bear to watch them (I've never recovered from Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein [1948]). Action films, especially ones in which a retired CIA agent or detective or whatever is called back to duty for one last assignment. And finally, anything with zombies, cyborgs, extraterrestrials, robots, demonic children who vomit blood, or tentacles.

Amnesia on Film: The Unsuspected (1947)

This time, amnesia minus the amnesia. Heiress Matilda Frazier, presumed to have perished in a shipboard fire, returns home where she's met by Steven Howard who claims to be her recently-wedded husband. She fails to remember him for the good reason that she's never met him and hasn't lost her memory. It's a case of "attributed amnesia." Not a disease at all -- merely a handy plot device, credible in black-and-white 40s murder mysteries where amnesia is as common as a slight cold. Matilda is temporarily deceived by Mr.Howard. So are the spectators.

Terrific direction by Michael Curtiz, fine performance by luminous Joan Caulfield, reliable work by steady Fred Clark, effortful ventriloquism by Constance Bennett in a part originally written for Eve Arden.

The Unsuspected borrows much too much from Laura (1944). In addition to the prominently-displayed portrait, there's Claude Rains channeling Clifton Webb. Plus the heroine's return from presumed death, the curious sexless relationship between an older man (the murderer) and a much younger woman. A smitten investigator. Good thing there's a dollop of fake amnesia to help differentiate the two films.

Amnesia on Film: The Vow (2012)

Amnesia movies are not absolutely fettered to reality, nor should they be. Hollywood amnesia, as has been frequently noted, is the most flexible and variable of illnesses. Nevertheless, The Vow (2012) breaks new ground in want of integrity. One reviewer called it a "heartless, soulless jumble," but that's letting it off easy.

A young woman, played by perky Rachel McAdams, suffers an automobile accident and forgets the five years of her marriage to a young man, played by wooden mumbling Channing Tatum. The couple stumbles around for ninety bumbling minutes but eventually he wins her back in cliche date-movie, rom-com tearjerk fashion. Loss of memory, which in any close-to-reality situation would be psychologically troublesome if not utterly disabling, proves to be of no more consequence than the loss of a pair of shoes or eyeglasses. Simplistic, superficial, offensive.

The film advertises itself as based on real events. Loosely based, I'd say, because in actual fact, there was an accident and she suffered loss of memory, but he had an affair, the marriage crumbled, and they divorced. But that was in another country, one in which real human beings might dwell.

"No redeeming characteristics" says another reviewer. The film is especially not redeemed by expressionless Channing Tatum, who fumbles and garbles a higher percentage of his dialog than any actor in the history of Hollywood.

Dreaming Noirly

I must be watching too many 1940-50s film noirs. They're infiltrating my dreams. 

Last night, in my very own bedroom, I hosted a noir festival. Fragments of a more intricate dream are all I can remember now, but the bits my memory retained were mighty vivid. The dream featured an attractive young couple. He's handsome in a Barry Sullivan way but unidentifiable; she's delicate, like Coleen Gray in Kiss of Death (1947) or possibly like fragile young Janet Leigh in Touch of Evil (1957). Some "mugs" want these young folks iced (the dream didn't say why) and they want it done in the most painful possible manner. The scene then cut to a rickety wood-framed house which replicated the building in the dude ranch run by Mercedes McCambridge in Lightning Strikes Twice (1951).The goons break in and sadistically slash the guy's throat and handcuff the girl to a post, then set the house on fire (which copied the ending of Kiss Me, Deadly [1955]). Next thing I knew, the young lady was alive (the dream didn't say how she escaped the flames) and was being recruited and disguised by a trio of FBI or police officers. Not plastic surgery, just makeup and a change of costume. The plan was for her to go underground to identify and expose the hoodlums (a plot device common to numberless noirs).

When I awoke, I was impressed by the imaginative work of my dreamatorium. "Not a bad plot," I said to myself. "Not brilliant, but original enough to serve. Add a car chase, a blonde songstress, a natty but corrupt district attorney, a crusading newspaperman, some heavies (Moroni Olsen and Mike Mazurki, perhaps), a heist gone bad, a skinny stoolie with a toothpick in his mouth, and a little amnesia, and you've got yourself a movie."

I should add that this dream came to me in high contrast black-and-white. Excellent camera work. Well-directed. Think Phil Karlson or Ida Lupino. With gowns by Orry-Kelly.

It's Big! We're Little!

Can it possibly be true that the universe as we know it is becoming larger and larger? The more we learn, the more it seems to expand. The scientists who know about such things now brag that the Milky Way numbers between 200 and 300 billion stars, nearly all of which are probably circled by planets. Moreover, these same experts now claim that there are something like one or two trillion such configurations -- some of them small but most larger than our own personal galaxy. And to top all that, there's a rumor circulating that our universe might be just one of an untold, possibly infinite number of other universes. Some of them Big Banging, some expanding, some collapsing.

These numbers are staggering and incomprehensible, at least to me. I can't even get a hold of a million of anything, even grains of sand, let alone a billion (a thousand million!) enormous stars.

Now they tell me that our universe began 13.8 billion years ago, more or less, and will go on for a hundred billion more. That's another very large number for me (or you) to assimilate. 

It's all mighty perplexing. And then let me add the toughest question of all: why is there something rather than nothing? Yes, why is that? How come?

There are some who find this sort of information dismaying because it confirms the triviality, the meaninglessness of our individual lives. How can I possibly worry about last night's insomnia or my latest nosebleed -- or indeed my very own life -- in a world of a gazillion planets, stars, ultramassive black holes, neutron stars, galaxies, and a universe which may have no discernible boundary or beginning or ending.

Yet I myself find all this information not dismaying but comforting - maybe even inspiring.

What are the odds that a planet might support life? Very small. And that the planet's precarious lifeforms would evolve for a couple of billions of years and then generate intelligent life?  And that a million years of mating and surviving by various evolving primitive and then recognizable humans might lead to my ancestors -- and that after thousands of lucky matings eventually resolve into my parents Manny and Lil who happened upon the precise instant to beget Me. And that I, in the second half of my 80s, way past my shelf life, would still be here to enjoy these extra innings.

All this work of creation and evolution and luck to culminate in Me.  

It's a miracle of cosmic proportions and should be hosannahed. Here I am, enjoying my still functioning brain. My stomach is mellow after a full meal and my skin is glowing from a stroll in the warm sun. At the end of the day, I will crawl under the covers with my bedmate and ladylove. Truly the stars have aligned to my benefit.

Nor let us not underestimate  the consummate joy of mattress and blanket.

My assemblage of molecules has had a great run -- much more than could be reasonably anticipated.  Soon my molecules will disassemble and then reassemble into someone else. I'm very glad to contribute to this phenomenon. 

But if so -- if we are so fortunate, as I believe us to be, why don't we as a people celebrate our good fortune? Take pleasure in our lives. What's the need for this continuing strife and wars and enslavements and genocides? What's the point of it? We're all sitting here, billions of us, for a second or so in an infinitely boundless and timeless universe. Why must half of us make life miserable for the other half? Why can't all we just get along?

Truly we are a horrid species.

I wonder whether other planets that support intelligent life have done any better. I hope so.

My Career as a Dowser

When we built the summer house/cabin/hovel in 1977, we needed to dig a well, and someone, probably the plumber, hired a dowser. I didn’t approve –-I would have hired a credentialed hydraulic engineer. For me, dowsers belong in the same ol' crazy crate as astrologers, phrenologists, flat-earthers, Shakespeare-author conspiracists, along with the lunatics who report on visits to the earth by ancient astronauts. Nevertheless, a dowser arrived, an elderly gentleman. Curiously, he dowsed with an old pair of rusted pliers rather than the traditional forked willow stick. He was an enthusiast for his trade and, ignoring my skepticism, showed my how to cut a willow and exactly how to hold it. After he left, I tried it out. A most odd experience, one of the oddest in my life, then took place. As I walked about, brandishing the rod, from time to time the tip of the willow would turn suddenly down. Not in a subtle way, but forcefully and dramatically – strongly enough to redden and even slightly cut the palms of my hands.  

Even more strange -- if I handed the willow to another person and he or she walked about, nothing happened. Nothing, that is, until I held that person's wrist. Then the dowsing rod went all crazy and twisted downward out of the holder's hands. 

It was a wondrous incredible experience and is vivid in my memory now these fifty years. But it was a one time only event.

Every once in a while, over the decades, just for fun, I would cut a piece of willow and walk about, but I’ve never been able to reproduce the phenomenon. The dowsing rod doesn’t dowse, doesn’t do anything at all;  just behaves like an ordinary piece of wood. 

I don't believe in dowsing. I don't believe that you can find underground water, or even underground electric wires as some think, by walking about with a piece of willow in your hands.  On the other hand, I know that something peculiar and very real happened to me that one time. Was there water underground. I don't know, but I know that I wouldn't dig a hole on the basis of that fleeting evidence. I am a man of reason, or at least I like to think so.

Incidentally, the place that the 1977 dowser picked out for us to dig was a great success. We've enjoyed a bounteous  supply of water for all these many years. 

But now that I know more about wells than I did half a century ago, I can read the landscape well enough to recognize that the dowser picked an obvious place to dig a well -- with or without the help of his magical pliers.

The "bottlebrush buckeye"

As a youth, I spent many a happy hour in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. One of the plantings that I remember vividly was what I conceived of as a "wall" of bottlebrush buckeyes. It's been many a year, but what stands in my memory is roughly 40 or 50 linear feet of 20-foot-tall decorative shrubs in full flower.

So naturally, when I came to West Bradford, I tried to reproduce the effect. I just happened to have a perfect spot for a wall of buckeyes -- a fertile slope of the proper size and shape. In 1980 (plus or minus a year or so) I purchased two such plants from White Flower Farm in Connecticut and set them 30 feet apart, optimistically hoping that over the course of the years they would expand to fill in the allotted space.  

It did not happen. One of the plants lingered for a year or so before giving up the ghost; the other stood still -- grew a bit, then died back over the winter. Our Zone 3 Vermont weather proved to be too harsh for a plant that had thrived in Zone 6 Brooklyn. I resigned my self to the fact that my experiment with the bottlebrush buckeye was a failure.

But then perhaps 10 years ago, after decades of stagnancy, the plant began to increase in size. Global warming?  Wetter summers? Maturity? I can't say. And then this past summer, after forty-plus years of doing virtually nothing, the bottlebrush buckeye produced some flowers. And there they are -- long awaited and very welcome!

(The purplish plant in the background is Joe Pye weed, eutrochium purpureum, which thrives and multiplies without the least bit of assistance from me. And also a 20-year-old weeping willow and young Eastern cottonwood, which I set in place about 5 years ago.)

This past summer, dazzled that the buckeye produced its extravagant flowers at last, I gave it a few hours of care. Weeded it, pruned away the dead growth,  and gave it a small optimisitc dose of 10-10-10 fertilizer. I'm very curious to see what happens next summer. Could it be that my 40-year old experiment will succeed at last?

My Life with Telephones

In the course of my lifetime, the telephone has gone from relatively rare to ubiquitous, from wall to pocket, and from rotary dial to cell. From no intelligence whatsoever to smart and then to very smart. Revolutionary changes.

When I was growing up in Flatbush, our family was prosperous enough to have a telephone (not everyone did), but the device was only employed for local calls, never for "long distance." Non-local calls were prohibitively expensive and were only for deaths. To be called to the phone by long-distance was ominous.

Before the innovation of seven-digit dialing, we were Windsor 6-2077. Sometime after WWII, our exchange was altered from WI 6 to GEdney 6. To me, this was an early indication that the world was unstable and would be filled with ups and downs. One day we were a Windsor, a royal house, and the next day we were a Gedney, a brand of dill pickle. 

Every telephone in existence looked exactly like this one.  The idea that they would ever look otherwise was inconceivable.  

For a month of so in the late 1950s, I had a job operating an old-fashioned switchboard at the Sears warehouse on Utica Avenue -- definitely my most satisfying telephone-related experience, lifetime. Ah that lovely click when the plug fully entered its receptacle! A delight!  The one I sat at looked almost exactly like this:

In my short time at the console, I became quite a proficient operator, only cutting off important calls a handful of times. It's hard to believe that such an antiquated-looking machine was still in use when I was a lad.

We must also recall the almost extinct telephone booth -- often out of order, because someone wielded a crowbar to make off with nickels and dimes. And smelly. Plus, one never had the right change when needing it most.  I do not mourn the passing of the phone booth.

When we moved to Vermont in 1968, the Topsham Telephone Company had not yet switched to seven digit dialing. Our home number was high-prestige 21, but we were jealous of the family whose number was 9. Ours was a four-party line -- also a thing of the past. I wonder whether my grandchildren have ever heard the phrase "party-line."  Or "rotary dial," for that matter.

When AT&T was deregulated and the market was thrown open to innovation, there came a great explosion of telephone styles. Phones blossomed into many odd colors and configurations. For a while, we owned one of these:

The Simpson phone was not my initiative but that of one of the younger members of the family.

But more change was in the works. The prediction that there would be pocket phones in the future seemed fantastical science fiction-y.  All phones had to be connected with wires -- otherwise how could the sound get out of the wall and into the handset. I scoffed.

Nowadays, everyone carries a cell phone. But it's not just a phone -- it's a computer. It does everything -- perhaps too much. There is substance to the frequently heard complaint that some individuals, especially young 'uns, relate more readily to their cell than to the person sitting next to them. It's a paradox: with more potential communication comes more loneliness. I myself must admit that there's a fascination to the cell phone that is disarming.  I'm trying not be allow myself to be addicted. But there is something wonderful about a machine that lets you not only speak with but to actually see your daughter, who is a thousand miles away. Not a trick that a rotary phone could perform.

Not to be an alarmist or a Luddite, there's a serious downside to the cell. It seems as though the machine  might be reorganizing youthful brains-- with unknown consequences,

Scenes like this one have become scarily familiar:

Look up, children, look up! Please look up!

Turtles and Metempsychosis

I would not want to be reincarnated as a turtle. Not at all.

Should it happen that I were to be reincarnated, I would prefer to return as one of those great sea birds -- the Wandering Albatross or the Great Frigatebird  or the Northern Fulmar -- that cruise for hundreds of miles over the Pacific -- soaring effortlessly, joyriding the thermals, blissfully savoring the salt spray at dawn and dusk. It would be glorious -- although not entirely without a downside, because if I were such a bird I would have to sustain myself on a repulsive sushi diet of raw fish. Yeesh.

But to live the next or a subsequent life as a turtle -- what a grim unpleasant prospect! Turtles do not soar; they're earthbound, and they move so slowly that they're almost immobile. At very best, they slog or plod. It's not that they're unsuccessful in their own way; after all, they've been around for 200 million years. Generations, therefore, have plod, have plod, have plod. But is there a creature on earth whose bodily configuration is more limiting, more dictatorial? Turtles spend a lifetime schlepping carapace and plastron up and down hills or over the desert sands. How can an animal constrained to eternally lug an outsize ponderous shell experience any kind of freedom or joy? 

Besides, turtles are ridiculously ugly. 

 

Bulky thick inelegant legs ending in frightening claws. Absurd useless tails. Toothless gaping mouths. Prominent nostrils, wrongly placed. Horrid corrugated necks. No ears, none at all. Foolish, fatuous expression. The only part of the turtle that might be considered attractive is the carapace (when it's not coated with slimy vegetation or studded with leeches), but in the entire history of the planet, no turtle has ever been able to admire its own integument. 

 

Imagine being reincarnated as a creature so imperfectly designed that it can't regain its legs when tipped onto its back. If I were a turtle, I would hate that. Legs flailing in the air. Undignified. Double yeesh.

 

Plus, many turtles eat worms.

 

Moreover, if I or someone dear to me were to become a turtle -- it's going to be a long haul, reincarnation-wise. Let's say, for example, that you were to be born again as a dung beetle -- why, you would endure a very unsavory couple of months, but then -- on you would go to the next life. Once reincarnated as a turtle, however, you're liable to be stuck in that ungainly shell for a century. And worse still -- some turtles "brumate" for half their lives. That's a heck of a lot of time to spend in a state of suspended animation. In addition -- and this is rather shocking -- some turtles extract oxygen from water through their "cloaca." I can't imagine how they do that, and, frankly, "'twere to consider too curiously to consider so." Not to mention turtle sex. Do turtles cuddle or snuggle? It must be quite an accomplishment to work around those massive clanking  shells. 

 

So no turtle reincarnation for me. But to tell truth, I find reincarnation itself, like most religious or quasi-religious ideas, utterly baffling. I presume it works something like this. I die, my soul is released from my corpse and immediately enters into a new body -- in this case a newly fertilized turtle egg. (I have no idea how this process works -- but let's all agree that it does). Immediately, there's a glitch. Turtle gender is not determined in the usual way, by XX and XY genes. Turtle gender is a consequence of the temperature at which the embryos develop inside the eggshell. Warm, male; cool, female (or vice versa in some species). What this means is that if my soul was infused or assimilated or injected into a turtle egg, it would not be immediately known whether I was going to be a boy turtle or a girl turtle. I don't really care, frankly; there's not much advantage to being one or the other. Turtles are not particularly sexually dimorphic and both genders are equally hideous. But I would like to know right away and not have to wait on some quirk of the weather. 

 

Reincarnation puzzles me for still another reason. How can I be sure that I haven't already been reincarnated? Perhaps I was a turtle (or an albatross) in a past life. I don't remember being other than I am, but how can I be certain? 

 

Or, to switch points of view, perhaps one of the turtles pictured above was once, let us imagine, Ragnar Naess (1900-1972), a bachelor sorghum farmer from O'Neill, Nebraska. Or even one of my less brainy former colleagues. How could we determine it; how could the turtle know it? If it's undeterminable, why does it matter?

 

Gosh, reincarnation is a tough nut to crack.

 

[December 15, 2022. Pearl Maneli writes: "I believe current reincarnation theory explains that your soul wouldn't transmigrate into a turtle at the moment of conception; it would do so only when the turtle hatches from the egg. So you can let your mind rest easy on the question of your turtle gender."]

 

[December 16. Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Thanks, Pearl. I am much relieved"]

Anemoia

The premise of Riley Black's The Last Days of the Dinosaurs (New York, 2022) is a most splendid one. Imagine, she proposes, that it is 66 million years ago and dinosaurs are the monarchs of the earth. What was it like, in that era, to be alive in, say, the steamy forests where Wyoming now lies -- a world in which club-tailed ankylosaurs were tracked by tyrannosaurs while primitive mammals scuttled in the ferny underbrush. Rich and strange, certainly. And then, how was it all transformed on "the worst day in the history of the planet" when the Chicxulub asteroid plowed into the Yucatan? One fine day, the dinosaurs were triumphant; and then in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the six-mile-wide asteroid crash lands and everything goes all kablooey -- the sure and firm-set earth shakes, the atmosphere turns furnace hot, and acid rain and smoke and fire and tsunamis snuff out 80 per cent of our planet's animal species.

It's a fabulous idea for a masterpiece of science writing, and consequently I'm grieved to report that The Last Days of the Dinosaurs is a disappointing book. It is loose and melodramatic and outrageously padded -- a thirty page essay turned into a swollen three hundred page opus. It's much too pop; it's insufficiently serious and therefore leaves poor frustrated me craving data and detail rather than reiteration. Who could believe that the high drama of Chicxulub could become quite so tedious? I put the blame on Ms. Black's literary agent, who, I have no shadow of doubt, advised her to "turn your idea into a book, and keep it easy -- not too technical -- you'll sell a lot more copies."

What a shame, because Black is well-informed and writes with intermittent flair. She loves her reptiles, and in particular displays genuine warmth, almost reverence, for every young person's favorite dinosaur, the tyrannosaurus rex. An infatuation that lingers from her childhood, I suspect. I myself, not similarly transfixed, might have supposed that T. Rex had been expelled from the Terrible Lizard Hall of Fame sometime in the 1990s, when it came to be gospel that the 60-foot tall monster was not a top-of-the-food-chain predator but merely a snuffling scavenger. Was it not revealed to us that the creature's meager brain was dwarfed by its olfactory bulbs, so that it could effortlessly detect decaying flesh over the unbounded western landscapes? And was it not also agreed that its puny forelegs were useless for pursuit or attack? Black will have nothing of such paleontological revisionism. Her T. Rex is a hunter, lurking in ambush to pounce and to crunch with one powerful bite the enormous protuberant osteoderms that protected the stegosaurus spine. To me, the idea that a beast as gigantic as a tyrannosaurus could conceal itself behind bush or boulder and sneakily lunge at its prey seems totally ludicrous.

Black, bless her kindly heart, firmly embraces the unrevised T. Rex. Her loyalty is transcendent. In a burst of psychological overkill, she describes her crush on the dinosaur as an example of anemoia. And what, readers rightly ask, is anemoia?  It's an unfamiliar word that describes a baffling concept. Upon investigation,"anemoia" turns out to be a recent coinage, a "fire-new" word (as WS, in LLL, calls such innovations). It's "a nostalgia for a time one has never known," such as Black seems to feel about the years and days that preceded Chicxulub. And here I must once again reveal my want of imagination. Anemoia, however hard I labor to grasp the idea, is too subtle for my downright brain. Isn't it the case that "nostalgia" is by definition a cherishing of something in one's own personal history, as such a one as I might remember with warmth a concert or a wedding or that long ago glorious day in which I, batting leadoff, started the game with a triple to right field.

I can't quite fathom a nostalgia for something I've not known in my own person. The emotion that Black describes I would call simple curiosity. I'm as intrigued as the next guy about the past and I can certainly summon a yearning to have been present at some great historical event, but I wouldn't call it anemoia. For example, I might wish that I had been at Fenway on September 30, 1960, the day that Ted Williams blasted a home run on his very last time at bat -- but I wasn't there and it would be a falsehood to claim otherwise. [Full disclosure: I was in attendance, just behind third base, the previous day, September 29, and therefore missed the moment by a scant twenty-four hours.] Unlike Black, I'm not anemoiac about the dinosaur-dominated world of the K-P boundary, but I have other anemoiac -- as I've now redefined the word -- yearnings.

My most pressing and immediate wish would be to have joined the crowd at a performance at the Globe Theatre in London, perhaps of Hamlet in 1599 or Macbeth in 1606. Why? Because even though Shakespeare's works have been studied microscopically for more than 400 years, no one really knows how those plays originally looked or sounded. My suspicion is that they were far more foreign, more strange, less realistic and more primitive than scholars recognize. After all, the most brilliant play ever written, King Lear, was performed in daylight and the actors had to project their voices to a crowd of 2000 people, many of them shuffling about, gossiping, and cracking hazelnuts. No sets, no curtains, no lighting, and no scenery to speak of. I'd guess that the cast employed a style of dramaturgy closer to its medieval inheritance of allegorical representation than we like to admit. Furthermore, I am convinced that if I were present there at the actual Globe, I would discover an endless series of unknown unknowns. Unimaginable unknowns, that would knock our anemoiac socks off. The past is another country; they do things a heck of a lot differently there.

But wait! My dormant anemoia, now aroused, yearns to experience in my own person other events in the past. Where else to indulge my wants? Certainly in Athens, at a performance of a play by Sophocles -- which I can guarantee to be a hundred times stranger than anything London could possibly offer.

But why only the arts?  Now that I think of it, I would love to take a gander at forested Manhattan Island when Henry Hudson's Half Moon made its first landfall. I could have talked to the Lenapes; tried to warn them about the dangers that were coming down the pike. And there's much more. Just prior to struggling through The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, I read Marie Favereau's The Horde (2021), a most fascinating history of the Mongol civilization that conquered and controlled the area from Hungary in the west to Korea in the east during the 13th century and the first half of the 14th. Favereau's depiction of the Mongols was novel and disorienting, essentially because I'm accustomed to think about great empires as centered on a dominant imperial city -- Athens, Rome, London. I believe that I understand a little of what life might have been like in Rome; after all, I've read some of the ancient historians and I know a bit about cities. I've even toured Pompeii, for goodness sake! But the Mongols did not live in cities; they were not particularly literate, they were unabashedly polygamous, animist, and almost entirely nomadic. It's a challenge to imagine a "city" of a hundred thousand people in constant migratory motion. When Mongol men went to war, which they seemed to do often and always, they brought along the women and children, the cattle-drawn carts and wagons and the felt tents along with their horses, goats and sheep. To spend time with a wandering horde, an entirely unfamiliar form of civilization, and to try to understand their mental world, would certainly challenge and enlarge my (and your) conception of what it means to be a human being.

Favereau doesn't dwell on such speculations (she is more concerned with military history than social or psychological matters) but nevertheless the ways in which the migrants related to each other and to their environment had to be entirely foreign to us mostly urban, post Age of Reason moderns. What was it like to be a Mongol? Perhaps I feel this question personally because a recent examination of my DNA tells me that I'm 1% Asian by genetic inheritance. I assume, naturally, that like approximately 16,000,000 other people, I'm directly descended from Mongol leader Chinggis (formerly Genghiz) Khan through one of his seven wives or his innumerable concubines. Is it anemoia, a recognition of my kinship to Grandpa Genghiz, that has produced in me, this morning, such a wildness in the blood? Or is it the caffeine?

In actual fact, although I'm most curious about Mongol life, I don't think that I would have made a good nomad. In the first place, I suffer from serious directional disabilities and would no doubt promptly misplace myself on the vast and featureless Eurasian steppe; and secondly, I lack enthusiasm for subsisting on kumis, the fermented mare's milk which was the staple of the Mongol diet.

Let me now admit that while I indulge some pseudo-anemoia for my distant Mongol forebears, I feel much closer to my more recent Ukrainian shtetl ancestors. If I could be plopped down in the western Ukraine, I might be able to absorb the texture of life in Staroconstantinov in 1895, just before brave Isaiah and Eta set out for America.  As things stand, I know almost nothing of any importance about the lives of my eastern European ancestors. How did these resilient folks survive centuries, millennia,  of dearth, disease and pogroms? What did they eat? Where did they sleep? What, indeed, did they do for "fun," if they had any conception of fun? What did they read? How did the sexes relate to each other? How did they find privacy? And most significantly: how seriously did they embrace that narrow, all-encompassing and demanding religion?

A nineteenth-century shtetl seems impossibly foreign and faraway, but in the longer time frame, it's actually very recent. The most distant past that we can readily imagine is when the archeological record begins to appear -- perhaps five thousand year ago. But my and your fully human ancestors migrated from the Olduvai Gorge some 60,000 years ago, which leaves approximately 55,000 years without any data at all -- or at least nothing beyond the merest occasional trace. For these many millennia our forbears lived in world where there were no cities, no writing, no pottery, no weaving, no domesticated plants or animals, no metals, no wheels and therefore no vehicles -- only stone hand axes and later spears and much later still bows and arrows. Two thousand five hundred precarious generations of foraging! I would like to see for myself how our common ancestors managed to survive when the gigantic short-faced bear competed for the cave and the terrifying European lion lurked in the shadows. I suspect also that the most dangerous predator our g g g... grandfathers faced was the tribe next door -- otherwise why would we have inherited such hostility to people who look or act just slightly differently than ourselves. Wouldn't it be profoundly anemoiac to join a family of our mutual forebears for a week or two and participate with them as they went about their lives?

What a treasure-trove of unknown unknowns would we confront!

The Ocellated Turkey

Turkeys, I was recently surprised to learn, come in two distinct species. The familiar one is the "wild turkey", Meleagris gallopavo, the big bird that in broods of twenty or so, wanders around my house and garden, eating seeds, insects, acorns and apples and occasionally leaving behind a fancy feather or two. 

They're new to the neighborhood. Until about twenty years ago, I had not seen a single turkey; now, they're everywhere. And bold. Or perhaps just indifferent to me.  

And then there's the second kind of North American turkey. It's rare -- found, nowadays, only in the Yucatan peninsula. It's the "ocellated turkey,"  and it's one heck of a fancy bird.

 

Ocellated? I was puzzled, stymied by this unfamiliar word. But then I remembered that an "ocellus" is an architectural term. An ocellus is the circular opening at the top of a dome, familiar to me from its celebrated use in the Roman Pantheon. "Ocellus" is obviously the diminutive of Latin "oculus," eye. It follows that an "ocellated turkey" is so called because it displays circular markings on its feathers, like a peacock (although none of the pictures of turkeys that I found on the internet revealed eye-like decorations. Many shimmering colors, however.

 

It's remarkable that the range of the "ocellated turkey" coincides with the habitat of the ocelot. Could such a turkey, if attacked and killed by an ocelot, be considered doubly ocellated"? And if, in its death throes, it thrashed and quivered, could it be said to oscillate?

In Praise of Hands

A few weeks ago, I found myself absentmindedly working in the perennial garden. I had wandered nearby and noted some weeds that needed emergency extirpation. I had therefore arrived without my usual trine of implements -- the dandelion puller, the hand shovel, and the Felco #2. Too lazy to fetch them, I began to tend to the plants toollessly and at the same time to muse upon effectiveness of hands alone. (Weeding often leads to musing, as every weeder knows.)  Is it not the case that the best tool of all is the human hand?  Because my garden soil is so friable, I was able to dig into the earth with my unaided index finger, grasp the roots of weeds and pull them. I wondered how the hand had come to so sensitive to small changes in soil temperature or soil moisture. Sensitive also, to the texture of things, so that I could identify the roots of witch grass, and remove them, while leaving untouched the very similar but different roots of the day lilies. For no good reason, my wayward mind wandered to the Houyhnhnms whom Gulliver outrageously claimed could grasp a needle between fetlock and pastern in order to sew garments. Amusing but impossible. The hooves of horses are wonderfully evolved for galloping but not for tatting or crocheting. Besides, why would a horse want to darn a sock? 

Our hands are superior implements  There's not another animal on the planet that can tie its own shoelaces. 

I've just read a fascinating book by paleontologist Madelaine Bohme called Ancient Bones. Bohme is concerned to argue that the "out of Africa" hypothesis needs modification. I am not knowledgeable enough to accept or deny her thesis, but I much appreciate her effort to bring me up to date about the evolution of our species, which is much more complicated -- infinitely more complicated -- than the story we were told just a generation ago.

Bohme includes a couple of speculative pages about the evolution of the hand. First came bipedalism, freeing the hands for a variety of new tasks. Bohme thinks that the development of stone tools and the development of hands went, so to speak, hand in hand. The need to hold the tool meant that the hand evolved to hold it properly -- with an opposable thumb of course. More sensitive fingers conferred an evolutionary advantage. More information from the fingers caused the somatosensory cortex, which controls the hands, to enlarge and process more sensations.

So now we can play the piano, thread a needle, throw a ball, type a letter, weed a garden, and perform a thousand other tasks that even chimpanzees, who apparently do not have great sensory input from their fingers, cannot do.

Bohme does not discuss the role of hands in human communication, either everyday or erotic.  A topic for another book, perhaps.

Best Garden Advice

I read a story in an "art of gardening" book many years ago that I will repeat here. A famous Japanese gardener, a "national treasure," was asked, "What's the secret of making a garden as beautiful as yours?" He didn't answer in words but lifted his arms and made a shearing or lopping motion. 

Many years ago, I asked Roy Huse, who had a most wonderful vegetable garden at the foot of South Road how he did it.  He said, and I quote verbatim, "you really got to put the shit to it."

And from my father: "it's all about preparing the bed before you plant."

So, don't skimp on getting the bed ready, add plenty of manure, and be ruthless about cutting things out.

And o yes, you'll need sun and water.

Trees Old and New

When we arrived here 54 years ago, the land was heavily forested but with a limited pallet of northern conifers and deciduous trees. In the first category were pines both red and white, three kinds of spruce, balsam fir, larch and hemlock. Among the hardwoods were sugar maples and red maples, ash, beech, red oak, black cherry, white, yellow and gray birch, quaking and big tooth aspen, and alas butternut and elms, which have both now succumbed to plagues. Common in the area but absent from our particular property were red cedar, cottonwood, basswood, walnut, and black locust. In the 70s of the last millennium, I planted cedars and cottonwoods; they are now mature and replicating themselves. The walnut that I planted fifteen years ago is now 25 feet tall and very handsome. I have only one basswood, which I found as a seedling and transplanted to to a prominent place;  I've been waiting all these years for its descendants. The black locusts that I grew from seeds harvested in Colorado are now starting to make an impression on the landscape. I've also added some trees that might be able to survive our warmer winters: a hickory (growing very nicely), a swamp white oak, a bur oak (and its lone offspring) and a sycamore (which has survived two winters).  I've also experimented and failed with some trees that grow just a bit south of us: catalpa, horse chestnut, "Crimson King" maple, little-leaved linden, and ginkgo. Perhaps I'll try again now that the weather has warmed. One of my neighbors has successfully reared a metasequoia; it's tempting to try but I think on the whole I'd rather stay with north American trees. On the other hand, we'll need some new trees to take the place of the ash, which are soon to be decimated. 

Red Pines

Our stand of magnificent trees is composed of red pines, pinus resinosa.

Each tree is between 60 and 65 feet tall and they are all exactly 51 years old. How can I be so sure about height and age? 

Height is easy to determine with the Calloway 300 Pro Laser Range Finder. Age?  Here's the history. In 1970, some friend or acquaintance, I can't remember exactly who, acquired a hundred red pine seedlings for a forestry project. He couldn't make use of all of them and so he gave us ten -- each one perhaps 4-6 inches long and the sum of their stems no thicker than a #2 pencil. I didn't know exactly what to do with these treasures, so i planted them in a row in the vegetable garden. Which is where they sat until 1972, when I decided to plant them on the dike of the newly constructed pond, where they remain.

In doing so i acted in defiance of the local wisdom, which is, never plant a tree on the dike. Why? Because the tree will eventually die, and the "water will follow the roots" and weaken the dam. I judged this reasoning to be faulty. In the first place, red pines, like all conifers, are shallow-rooted. The surface of the dike is fifteen feet above the level of the water in the pond, so when the pine eventually dies, its rootball will still be above water level. Moreover, red pines are reported to live for centuries (some say three hundred years), and I just can't bring myself to worry about what's going to happen to a dike in the far distant future when, no doubt, the pond will long since have reverted to the thick swamp that it was before we dug it out.

But why red pines rather than the white (pinus strobus) which is generally considered to be the much superior species? Because a), I owned these red pine seedlings and b) because at that time many of the white pines in our neighborhood were suffering from a insect-borne disease that killed the leader shoot and therefore deformed the tree (leader shoot disease seems to be a thing of the past and now our young white pines are again growing up tall and straight).  And red pines as consistently healthy.

For their first decade, the red pines made scarcely any impression on the landscape. Now they dominate. When I sit in their shade, I am pleased to recall their entire history, which allows me to tell them, proudly, "I knew you when you were just a sprout!"

 

 

 

Fly Swatters

For many years, we've had to make do with this inferior fly-swatter:

It's made of molded plastic and extruded metal wire. It's not handsome -- a ghastly inappropriate pink-purple color for the flapper and a small gauge white-coated wire for the handle. Is there a name for this  styleless style, other than dime-store cheap. Mid-century modern in its least attractive manifestation. Not only unbeautiful, it leaves much to be desired in function. The flapper is inflexible and rigid, which makes it difficult to kill the fly without splattering it. Moreover, the wire handle lacks integrity and offers an uncomfortable grip.

Now feast your eyes on this newly-acquired fly-swatter. It's a thing of beauty.

Notice the turned hardwood handle (maple, I believe, or possibly birch), perfectly suited to the human hand. The heavy gauge shaft leading to a genuine metal screen flapper. It's a fly-swatter to savor;  a classic. Many a graceful swat in it.

An anniversary or a birthday in the offing? Nothing says "I love you" more than a fly-swatter of distinction. It's also unsurpassed as a wedding present. If you're in a generous mood, "his" and "hers" fly swatters will get that marriage off to a great start.

Linen, Silk, etc.

I've been reading about the origin of spinning and weaving -- specifically E. J. W. Barber's Prehistoric Textiles (Princeton, 1991), a comprehensive and exhausting survey of everything that was known about the subject thirty years ago. I'm dazzled -- in part by the author, who turns the story into an adventure, but even more so by our brilliant neolithic ancestors. Some among our forbears, starting perhaps 30,000 years ago, looked at this plant, common flax, 

and figured out how to turn it into linen -- a complicated, many step process. How did they even begin to imagine such a transformation? Did they examine the plant and say, hey that looks like it will make a nice shirt or a pair of pants? To arrive at such a concept seems like an act of almost preternatural intelligence. After all, there was no template or model. It's not as though there were other fabrics made from other plants fibers. Flax into linen was a first. There were predecessors. Clothes, I imagine, in the form of animal skins or furs, must have been in use. I've read that reeds and other plant materials had been plaited into baskets and nets. But flax into linen was not at all obvious. We can be proud of our ancestors.

Here's a picture of the oldest recovered linen garment: the so-called Tarkhan Dress, which was found in a cemetery near Cairo in 1913 and radiocarbon-dated to between 3482 and 3102 BCE, or 5 and a half millennia ago. It's quite stylish and isn't in much worse shape than some of the favored garments in my own personal wardrobe.

Anadromous or Catadromous?

Until this last week, when I read Patrik Svensson's Book of Eels (2019), I had never encountered either of these lovely and mysterious adjectives. I'm delighted to add "anadromous" and
"catadromous," along with their cousin "diadromous" to my vocabulary, though when I'll be able to drop any of these words into my quotidian or even hebdomadal discourse is not immediately obvious, especially inasmuch as I'm not all that confident about their accentuation. Moreover, I rarely get into heart-to-hearts about icthyic migration. 

Anadromous fishes hatch and spend their first months in freshwater streams and rivers but then they migrate to the vasty deep, where they grow and mature. When they feel ready, they return to the streams in which they were spawned to deposit and fertilize their eggs. Salmons are famously anadromous (as well as romantic and celebrated), but equally so are less-heralded smelt, herring, and shad. Eels, on the other hand, are catadromous. They are hatched deep in the ocean and then drift and wander to freshwater streams and rivers. European eels may spend, according to Svensson, as many as fifteen years in the shallows until they get the urge for going. No one knows what calls to them, but they plain have to go. Then they set out for the dangerous Sargasso Sea in the mid-Atlantic. Eel reproduction has entirely evaded the eyes of human investigators.  Nor has a single eel egg ever been identified. Eels are modest, private, discreet. No one  knows if or how eels select their mates. Do they enact elaborate courtship rituals, or do the females simply lay their putative eggs amidst a cloud of eelish milt?

Eels are not kosher, but not because they are catadromous. The rules, as set out in Leviticus, are very clear: "Everything in the waters that has fins and scales, whether in the seas or in the rivers, you may eat. But anything in the seas or the rivers that has not fins and scales is detestable to you."  Why the Lord of Hosts set His face against shrimp and clams is unknowable -- but it worked, in the sense that the religion survived and, some say, prospered for lo these three thousand years. Food taboos are a common feature of religions -- they help to separate us from them. But shouldn't taboos be minimally consistent?  If the author or authors of Leviticus had said, don't eat eels, they're slimy, ugly and tasteless to boot -- well that would be a religious prohibition I could honor. But the scales thing, I don't know, because it's now clear that eels do have scales (as well as fins). Eel scales are very small. They are embedded in the skin, and they are smothered with eel slime. They are difficult to find, but they're definitely, unquestionably present. Yet the authorities continue to deride eels as treyf and have added the distinctly unBiblical gloss that the fish's scales must be visible and detachable without harming the skin. Unjust to eels, I say. I think they deserve a retrospective pass and a full rabbinical apology.  

My reasons for not eating eels are plain and sincere: eels are hideous beasts. Even Svensson, who loves eels and eel-fishing, admits that they are loathsome to any sensible palate. 

Query: my daughter was born and lived here in her home town until she was eighteen years old. Then she left for California, where she birthed and raised her two fine children. Now she's returned home to her native streams at last. So is she catadromous or anadromous?

Today Let Us Celebrate the Blanket

What an excellent invention! Imagine life without the blanket. At night, we'd still be keeping warm with hay and leaves. Yeesh, defective insulation. Hay and hayseeds in our noses and mouths. Leaves, leaflets, thick main ribs and petioles poking and imprinting our skin. Constant renewal problems: "Have remembered to fetch the hay for tonight yet?" Cleanliness problems -- small insects in the hay and leaves, however carefully processed. And then frequent trips to "Hay and Leaves" -- the chain of stores that dominates the market. "Do you know what they're asking this year for a half bale of leaves?"

When we pull that luxurious blanket over our shoulders, do we remember to thank the inventor or inventors of the cotton or woolen blanket?  Are we sufficiently appreciative of the luxury in which we live?

Coming soon: National Pillow Day.  

Tails

Most animals, mammals included, sport tails. As well they should. Tails are truly excellent appendages -- essential equipment for survival in many cases. Most primates have tails, but alas, the apes, our most immediate cousins, lack these useful "limbs." Some random mutation, way back when, and zap, no more tails. As a result, we humans live in a tragically diminished universe. And deep down, we feel the loss -- it's a fact that humans have been desperately trying to grow tails for countless millennia. Embryo after embryo puts his or her whole heart into the effort. Tails are there, prominently, between day 31 to 37 of the gestational process, but then they disappear -- leaving the poor embryo dispirited and regretful. In mourning! How much happier a species we would be if we could only wag. 

Tails have many uses. For locomotion, obviously. We'd be much better tree and monkey-bar climbers if we had good prehensile tails. We wouldn't be nearly so earthbound. There would be fewer dangerous falls if we had tails -- they're essential for balance. Just watch a cat or a squirrel. Plus a human with a tail could grab on to something to keep himself upright. A tail can also be used for defense. Grab the bad guy's arm with a good strong grasping tail. Think about how much more interesting the martial arts or wrestling would be if were were betailed. Imagine how useful a prehensile tail would be at a cocktail party; both your hands are occupied spreading the green stuff on the cracker, so you hold your wine glass with your tail. 

Tails are also good communicators; they're expressive. Observe canis domesticus: submission, aggression, defiance, excitement, puzzlement. Tails would be important for parent child interactions. "Don''t you dare swish your tail at me, young lady." If dogs can do it, why couldn't we do it better?  

And also sexual activity. Imagine the possibilities. 

Style: "how are you wearing your tail this year?" Billion dollar industries revolve around haircare. Tailcare offers even greater possibilities. I'm sure that the expense of tail grooming, tail coloring, tail enhancing, and tail bejeweling could lift us out of most recessions. Tailcare would be one of the major drivers of the economy.

Human life would have been infinitely richer.

Brown Recluse

Last night, I was lying in bed comfortably reading Michael Kulikowski's excellent new book on the last years of the Roman Empire. I was concentrating very hard, because it's difficult for me to retain the decisions made at Nicaea in 325. I can read a paragraph about the Arian or some other "heresy" and five minutes later I can't remember who was on what side, or why it matters, except that those on the wrong side were liable to be burnt alive. What part of the brain is supposed to retain this stuff?  In any case, I was lost in the book, quite content, comfortable -- supportive mattress, soft pillow and all that -- while, unbeknownst to me, a spider was making its way up the backside of the book cover. Why? Where did it come from?  All I know is that it rounded the bend, so to speak, nonchalantly strolling into view at the very top of the verso page.

Immediately the most primitive part of my brain was activated, I elevated out of the bed like some sort of 1950s cartoon character, hovered for a second or two, and then found myself on the floor, frantically flapping the sheets and blankets, searching for the offending arachnid. Get him before he gets me!

If I understand what happened, the amygdala, the part of the brain that's in charge of fear, governed my actions. The amygdala has been producing fear and flight responses long before it came to be incorporated into homo sapiens. 

After a few minutes we (I had called in auxiliaries) located the offending guy, and he's now sitting on my desk in a tightly sealed Bonne Maman jam jar.

I think it's a brown recluse. It sure looks like one. The color and shape are right out of the official catalog. According to the authorities, the only foolproof way to ascertain if it's a brown recluse is to count its eyes -- six rather than the usual spidery eight. But anyone who thinks that I'm going to get close enough to this spider to count its eyes has another think coming. Brown recluses are rare in our part of the world, but they're not unknown. My book came via interlibrary loan from Laramie, Wyoming; perhaps the spider came along for the ride.

Why be frightened of a brown recluse the size of a quarter, legs extended?  "Brown recluse bites can inflict significant or even life-threatening damage. Bites may cause severe pain, ulcers, fever, chills, nausea, joint pain, or even seizures."  Also, necrosis. Scars from necrotic flesh can last a lifetime. A friend of a friend lost a few months of his life and a hunk of gluteus maximus to a bite on the butt. 

The spider is quite active now in its new home -- the jam jar. It's a beautifully engineered little creature and very industrious, unceasing in its determination to find the way out. I admire it, behind glass, and I probably share a lot of DNA with it -- though it's hard to feel a close kinship. 

The "take-away": even though some parts of my brain have deteriorated, my amygdalae are in splendid working order.

The "Yips"

The yips have been big news this week because Jose Altuve, Houston's golden-glove second baseman has made three throwing errors in two games. Glaring, costly errors. He's bounced balls to first base and to second base -- throws of twenty or forty feet which he has made successfully thousands of times in his outstanding career.

The "yips" is sports jargon for the sudden, inexplicable inability to make an ordinary or routine play. It's commonly used by golfers when they start missing short putts --but baseball has its famous yippers -- Steve Saxe, Chuck Knoblauch (both of them second baseman who have the shortest, easiest throws)  and now, possibly Altuve. Sometimes a good pitcher will lose his control and start to miss badly; the retired pitcher at the microphone will say, "he's lost his release point," which is a yippish diagnosis without using the word. Athletes think that the problem is psychological but it's possible that the condition is merely neurological - a "focal dystonia" or muscle spasm in the wrist. Basketball yips? Yes, sometimes a good foul shooter will miss four or five in a row. 

I suspect that the yips may not be a sports-only syndrome.

Once, a decade or two ago, I was driving across the country on a four-lane and needed to brake. For some reason, my feet (I was driving a standard transmission so both feet and the clutch pedal were involved) couldn't remember which was the brake pedal. I flailed with both feet and was utterly panicked for about five long seconds. Then I came to my senses, put the correct foot on the correct pedal, and continued on in normal fashion. Life continued. But if I had crashed the car and killed myself, which was certainly a possibility, investigators would have thought that I had fallen asleep at the switch. They'd have been wrong; it was just the yips -- a failure to perform a task that should have been entirely routine.

I wonder how many road disasters are caused by undiagnosed yippishness.

Do actors get the yips? Do musicians? Dentists?  Airline pilots? Surgeons ("You know, I've done that back surgery hundreds of times but three out of the last four, I've sliced entirely through the guy's spinal cord").

My Life in Objects -- IX (Shovel)

It's called a transplant shovel, and it's manufactured by Sneeboer, a company located in Holland. If you want to buy a garden tool from Sneeboer, you get on the virtual line, and then wait until your number comes up. Worth waiting.

I have a weakness for well-made garden tools. This one might be the best I own, my favorite, although the Felco #2 hand pruner is also a work of art.

Note the construction. The V-shaped blade is one piece of solid steel. It's not screwed or bolted to the ash shaft, but rivetted, twice. The "D-handle" itself is carved out of a single solid piece of hardwood, so it can't fall apart.

I use the shovel to dig plants from crowded areas of the perennial garden to transplant or to separate. It's also ideal for poaching ferns from the forest. The shovel is the only tool that lets you easily divide a woody clump of Siberian irises (or any other clumping perennial). With a standard spade, when you try to get a little purchase, you fall to left or right or to the ground, endangering your cranky old vertebrae. It's a superbly balanced tool, a pleasure to use. It's going to be around for many more years.

We call it the "magic shovel."

What Are the Odds?

It's a commonplace that every one of us is improbable and accidental -- a fluke of all flukes. The odds against you or me or any particular person being born, of coming into life, are infinitesimal -- a positron's dimension (if positrons have dimension) shy of nothing, of zero.

Why is any birth so unlikely?  To begin, while every sperm is sacred (as we're told on good authority), every sperm is also unique. There are 200 million or more of the little whipper-snappers in the normal ounce or so of human male ejaculate -- each one a quirky unique assemblage of genes. Both your and my individual existence depends on one particular sperm lashing itself into a lather to be the first to break the tape. If the sperm with your name on it had foundered, and the dark horse sperm in the next lane had penetrated the egg, you yourself wouldn't have been conceived, wouldn't have existed. An entirely other human being would have suckled at the breast, cried in the crib, perched in the high chair. If you're a boy, your "other" might have been a girl, and vice versa.

So we are all many-millions-to-one long shots. But multiply the odds against you yourself being welcomed to the world by the even more remote odds against the conceptions of your four grandparents. Your grandmas and grandpapas exist only because in each case two people out of all the potential great-grandparent-generation cohort on earth chanced to meet and find a particular opportunity on a particular day and particular spot of time to copulate so that those remote grandsires could launch their own flotilla of swimmers upriver. How many accidents had to occur to compile the particular DNA which comprises your own identity and individuality? 

Then we must add factors such as the strife and wars and migrations and diseases that united or separated our great-grandfolks and their great-great grandfolks and yea, even unto our Olduvai forebears and to the pliopithecoids who preceded them, and then back through the early mammals and to the dark backward and abysm of time. Gosh, it makes you wonder how anything at all ever happens to happen in this random chancy aleatory world -- and yet remarkable things (such as you and I being born) continue to occur. And a good thing, too.

Even More Wisdom

 

I have the hardest time remembering the number of stars in our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Is it 300 million or 300 billion?  Either number is so far out of my ken, so far beyond my ability to grasp, that it won't stick in my head. Moreover, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference. But now I've checked once again -- and it's 300 billion stars (ballpark --  not an exact door-to-door census). That's three thousand millions of stars. Also, it's 130,000 light years from one side of the galaxy across to the center (the radius). The mass of our galaxy is 1.5 trillion solar masses. Does that figure include or exclude Dark Matter? I don't know. 

That's just the start. The full story is even more astonishing still. In addition to the Milky Way, there are approximately 34 billion galaxies such as ours in the universe. Or there used to be until a few years ago; the most recent estimate is 100 billion galaxies. From my standpoint, here on what Shakespeare naively called "the sure and firm-set Earth" -- a smallish planet revolving around the lucky old sun in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way -- whether there are 34 billion or 100 billion galaxies out there doesn't much change the situation. In a nutshell: it's big; we're little.

Even seventy years ago, when I was a boy just starting to learn about the stars, the universe was smaller and simpler. No one told me, because no one knew, about the Big Bang, about star formation, about black holes and supermassive black holes, standard candles, quasars, exoplanets, etc. Knowledge is expanding as rapidly as the universe; it's only a few centuries ago that Galileo was sent to his room for proving that Earth wasn't a still point at the center of the world. "Eppure, si muove."

Actually, I'm glad that Copernicus and Galileo and Newton de-centered the universe. I rather prefer being insignificant. Standing at the center of the universe -- well, it was too much responsibility, too much pressure. It's mighty consoling to be trivial. It helps to put our daily woes in perspective.

Is it more staggering that the universe is so ridiculously immense or that members of our species have had the smarts to figure it out. Not only the engineering skills to devise telescopes and spacecrafts to gather the data, but the brains to think abstractly and mathematically. And the courage to do so. We're an accomplished and admirable species when we're not torturing and killing each other for no particular reason. I'm proud of us, some of the time.

When my father was the age I am now, he said to me, "As far as I can figure, I'm just a link in a long chain going from nowhere to nowhere." He was exactly on target. But we should also remember that the chain of which he spoke includes Bach and Rembrandt and Einstein. And you and me  And as long as I remain a link in that chain, I intend to make the most of my insignificant existence -- the only one I have.

"That which we are, we are."

The State of Ornithology in the Seventeenth Century

I've just read Tim Birkhead's biography of The Wonderful Mr Willoughby, The First True Ornithologist (London, 2018). Birkhead's thesis is that Francis Willoughby was not merely a bird watcher, but an innovative, diligent, and imaginative scientist, the founder of a new area of knowledge. 

Ornithology when Willoughby (1635 –1672) started to look at birds was astonishingly primitive. For example, students did not even agree that birds migrated. Perhaps, as Aristotle had suggested, they hid in holes during the winter. Perhaps they transmuted from a species that departed to a species that arrived. With no observers in southern lands and no rapid communication, it's not surprising that it was hard to imagine that birds flew south in the fall and returned in the spring. Even now, when all is revealed, migration still seems, at least to me, to be mysterious, miraculous, and wondrously improbable. 

Before the "new philosophy put all in doubt," the assumption that governed all "science" was that the natural world should be studied for evidence of divine wisdom -- a practice which blinkered understanding and limited speculation. The questions that people asked about birds were therefore not particularly challenging. They asked which ones were good to eat, which ones could be kept in cages, and which ones had medicinal value. 

The first task of new ornithology was simply to take a census. What birds live here, by what names are they called, and how should they be classified?  In the non-standardized late medieval world, most birds bore regional or demotic names, and sometimes the same name was attached two or more species of birds. It took a while before the ars-foot came to be recognized and conventionalized as the great-crested grebe and to earn the official designation Podiceps cristatus. It was the same with the such regionally-named birds as the annet, bald buzzard, the Bohemian chatterer, the copped douker, the coulterneb, the didapper, the dun-diver, the fern-owl, the flusher, the gid, the glead, the gorcock, the ox-eye, the pickmire, the puit, the puttock, the pyrag, the rock ouzel, the scarf, the skout, and the witwall?  It remained to be demonstrated that the "yarwhelp" "was in fact the East Anglian name for the bar-tailed godwit and was to be distinguished from the similar black-tailed godwit." That the sea-pie was an oystercatcher. That the elegug was a guillemot. "The sea-swallows they there (on Caldey Island) call spurs, and the razor-bills are called elegugus.... This name elelgug some attribute to the puffin, and some to the guillem[ot];  indeed they know not what they mean by this name." Nomenclature was a thicket.

Willoughby was an energetic surveyor and classifier. But as he became more familiar with bird life, he started to ask questions of genuine scientific interest. What is the function of the tomial tooth? Do all birds of the same species have the same color iris? How many birds have rictal bristles? Do birds who lay two eggs produce one male and one female? Do female birds ever have two ovaries and two oviducts? Can birds hold on to their eggs at will, or are they laid involuntarily? How do birds survive the cold of winter? Why do birds molt?

While these are not necessarily the questions of a modern ornithologist, they certainly represent a new beginning. Many thanks to Birkhead for bringing Willoughby to our attention.

How sad that the first true ornithologist died at age thirty-six. 

 

 

Missing Megafauna

Many years ago, sometime during the previous millennium, I was taken to an African game park -- elephants, rhinoceroses, giraffes, and lions (the hippos were AWOL). It was astonishing to see these huge beasts. I didn't realize at the time that it was semi-miraculous that these creatures had survived to our day, even in a de facto zoo, when so many other massive animals had recently gone extinct. When homo sapiens arrived on the scene, say 50,000 years ago, there were many animals that would have made a zoo park several orders of magnitude more remarkable that the one I visited. Why did these beasts go extinct?  Disease, habitat change, and competition are likely culprits but it's hard to deny that our predatory ancestors must take some of the blame.   

Yes, the game park had lions, but it would have been infinitely more exciting if it housed not only the African lion, but the European lion which was half again as large and which survived lately enough to be well known to the Greeks.

Other big cats were also missing: the famous saber tooth, everyone's nightmare, as well as the American false cheetah, a cheetah-like cougar weighing 190 formidable pounds. I would also have liked to see the thylacine, the so-called "marsupial lion" or sometimes "Tasmanian tiger" which survived until 1936, late enough to be photographed.

I would also have liked to see a cackle of European hyenas. Even more, the two-ton short-faced Bear, with whom our paleolithic ancestors competed, which was three times the size of a modern polar bear. The equally large ground sloth, even the bones of which are impressive.

And the sloth lemur, the size of a big male gorilla. The Irish deer, as big as a moose, with an outsized, out-of-proportion rack. Then there were the elephant-like animals: the Columbian mammoth of the American southwest, smaller than its modern African cousin, but with astonishingly curved tusks. The wooly mammoth, surviving until just 3700 years ago on Wrangel Island off the Siberian coast. The straight-tusked elephant, two or three times the size of modern African elephant. The North American mammoths. And also Cuvier's gompothere, which looks like an elephant but isn't one, but which was seven feet tall at the shoulder and which lasted until about 14,000 years ago:

And along with them, the morningstar-tailed glyptodon, a five thousand pound armadillo: 

I would have loved to cast my eye on the diprotodont, the largest known marsupial, which weighed in at three tons and lived until 45,000 years ago

The wooly rhinoceros, as large as a diprotodont. The sivathere, an odd-looking  giraffid. The tree kangaroo. The short-faced kangaroo, three times the size of any living kangaroo.

And right there in Vermont, rustling and stomping in the forest, were the stag moose and Jefferson's ground sloth and the long-nosed peccary and Harlan's musk ox and the Vero tapir and the giant beaver, all recently gone. (You wouldn't have wanted to come face-to-face with a giant beaver. Or swim in its pond, if it made ponds. You'd be better off listening to it slapping its tail in a game  park.)

 And then there were some true avian oddities worth taking a gander at: the flightless moas of New Zealand, the female at 440 pounds, two-and-half times the size of the male. The cursorial owl, a three-foot tall flightless owl, which pursued its prey afoot. Haast's eagle, with a wingspread of seven and a half feet. The five hundred pound Elephant Bird, which survived in Madagascar until a thousand years ago. 

And then the tarpan, the warrah, the toxodon. Strangest of all, macrauchenia, a three-toed ungulate not closely related to anything alive today, which looked something like a humpless camel with a droopy snout and which was around until about 10,000 years ago. 

It would have been quite a show if these animals had survived. Well worth the price of admission. 

A Choice Euphemism

Victorian novelists had a hard time describing bodies, especially female bodies. Their usual practice was to sidestep such subjects entirely though the more daring of them might resort to suggestion or innuendo.

Here's an instance in which Thomas Hardy ties himself into comical  knots trying to tell his audience that although Tess Derbyfield (in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, 1891) is very young and almost childish she has already developed a large bosom: "She had an attribute which amounted to a disadvantage just now; and it was this that caused Alec d'Urberville's eyes to rivet themselves upon her. It was a luxuriance of aspect, a fullness of growth, which made her appear more of a woman than she really was. She had inherited the feature from her mother without the quality it denoted. It had troubled her mind occasionally, till her companions had said that it was a fault which time would cure."  So very elliptical. It's distressing that frank-minded Thomas Hardy had to resort to such circumlocutions.

A later novelist might simply have noted that she was physically mature and that her emotions would eventually catch up but for now she was vulnerable.

Back in Brooklyn we might have said, "Though she's only a kid, he has a pair of gazongas on her like you wouldn't believe and they're going to get her into a whole lot of trouble"

Year of the Rooster

The rooster came to our attention about a month ago. We heard him before we saw him. He was living at the edge of the forest, about one hundred yards from the house. After a few days he became bolder and we were able to catch a glimpse now and then. He's a Barred Rock, fully mature, with a bright red comb and superior wattles, but with woeful tail feathers. We don't know from where he came. We asked around but none of the neighbors is missing a rooster. We guessed: he's an escapee, or, perhaps his owner became tired of him and kicked him out of the truck, or (my favorite theory) he was in a rooster fight, lost his tail feathers and retired to the woods in shame. But in fact, we have no idea how he came to settle on our property.

Little by little he started to become more comfortable with us. He would spend his day in the flower garden, furtively eating insects. He was especially fond of earwigs. A good occupation, I thought. No harm except to the bugs. Eventually he came to tolerate our presence. He would sit a few yards away, studying me while I weeded. He gained our respect, because he managed to survive even though the forest is filled with foxes and fisher cats and weasels and coyotes and the air is patrolled by hawks. He liked to visit the donkeys and peck around their manure piles.  When he started to roost not in the forest but in the blueberry bushes close to the house I became concerned -- this may be more of a rooster guest than I need. And then he took up the habit of cock-a-doodle-do-ing at dawn just outside our bedroom window. And during afternoon nap time. And familiarizing himself with the vegetable garden, where he snacks on cucumbers. (He loves cucumbers.) He became ever more bold -- a few days ago he was just outside the kitchen, pecking on the glass door, hoping, I imagine, to be let inside. And when I didn't let him in, he left a large retaliatory splash of rooster dropping right at the doorway.

We looked out of the small north window of our bedroom and there he was perched on the railing, peering in. A peeping-Tom rooster. (Did he catch an eyeful!!) 

One day a near neighbor telephoned: "Your rooster is here."  "He's not my rooster."  

And then he disappeared. For the first time in a month, there was no crowing at dawn.  OK, we thought, some predator got him. One of these days, we'll stumble upon a bunch of black and white feathers in the forest.

But then a friend who lives on Ira's Pinnacle told us that he had seen a pair of chickens on Hackett Hill Road about a half a mile up the road. He couldn't be sure, but he figured it must be "your" rooster and a hen. 

So that's where he's been!! He's a gallinaceous gallant gallivanting with the local ladies. I thought, good for him; I don't have to concern myself with him any longer. He'll go feral and start a family. He must not know about Vermont winters.

But not so. This morning he was back, solitary, crowing vigorously outside my window. His romance, if it were a romance, didn't work out. I can't imagine why because he's become quite a handsome bird. He personable, friendly and he's grown an an impressive new set of tail feathers. He's plump and shiny; his walk, once furtive, has become a decisive strut. There he is now, cock-a-doodling his head off in the patch of cucumbers.

Side Effects

LENFERA is generally safe to use, but possible side effects include stuffy or runny nose, headaches, goosebumps, hiccups, cramps, sensitivity to bright lights or glare, shingles, gingivitis, numbness of lips or upper palate, dry scalp, ringing in the ears (tinnitus), acid reflux, dizziness, hair loss, hearing loss, kidney stones, constipation and/or diarrhea, sudden loss or gain of weight, inability to swallow, drooling, desiccation, macular degeneration, bunions, uncontrollable twitching or muscle spasms, rectal itch, toenail fungus, nausea, abdominal pain, difficulty with breathing, edema, fistula, halitosis, absence of libido, tachycardia, swelling in knees or other joints, scabiosa, bots, flatulence, loss of insight, roseola, Osceola, bloat, priapism, Purim, bowel obstructions, failure to thrive, scoliosis, creeping phlox, aggression, acne, increased facial or body hair, world-weariness, dyspepsia, rash, fatigue, agoraphobia, lycanthropy, fever, tremors, blurred vision or sudden blindness, frostbite, ringworm, procrastination, irritability, hot flashes, mange, barnacles, pellagra, night sweats, bladderwort, paranoia, clumsiness, thrush, zeugma, migraine, feelings of humiliation, heart arrest, tuatara, memory loss, white nose, rapture, paralysis, stage fright, bioluminescence, scurvy, hallucinations, chancre, catarrh, pink eye, red eye, rabies, insomnia, nightmares, spontaneous combustion, Coggins, blurring of gender identity, wasting disease, aphasia, blackouts, suicidal ideation, nosebleeds, woe, catatonia, gangrene, acute pain, multiple organ failure, death.

If symptoms persist, consult your physician.

LENFERA has been approved by the FDA.

Geological Words New to Me

Unlike most sciences, where there are numerous pseudo-Greek or pseudo-Latin coinages, geology offers all sorts picturesque and lovely words that have been in the language for years  -- and are novel to me. So "graywacke" --a muddy sandstone containing particles of quartz"; "fumarole" -- a small vent emitting jets of steam; "sinter"  -- a crust of calcium carbonate; "molfette" -- a vent emitting gases such as carbon dioxide; "coquina" -- a cemented mass of debris of shells; "clint" -- a sharp ridge; "grike" -- a fissure or crack opened by dissolving limestone; "knickpoint" -- a sharp step, up or down, in a river; "gour" -- a calcite ridge formed when water rich in carbonate flows over an irregular surface; "drumlin" -- an isolated mountain; "nunatak" -- a projecting peak in land otherwise covered by ice;  "firn"-- a mass of ice pellets compacted by the weight of snow above;  "cwm" -- a steep rock basin;  "col" -- a narrow pass; "esker" -- a winding ridge formed by retreating glaciers; "pingo" -- a cone, dome  or hump caused when freezing water expands beneath the permafrost and pushes up the earth; "yardang" -- parallel ridges of hard rock.

I'm not convinced that I could recognize any of these phenomena of my own accord. I'd probably need a professional geologist or guide. But the words themselves sure are magnificent.  And this is just a small sample of the wordhoard. 

Notes on "Mucilage."

“Mucilage” is a word whose sound is wildly inappropriate to its meaning. In the world of adhesive nomenclature, “paste” is good and “glue” is even better. Trisyllabic mucilage ought to denote something far more serious -- perhaps a problem involving waste disposal ("OK, we've rescued the elephants, but what are we going to do with all that mucilage.")

In my life, mucilage made its mark long before glue arrived on the scene. In Brooklyn (and perhaps elsewhere) 1940s schoolchildren were issued small curvy bottles of the yellow stuff, each fitted with a red-rubber tip which was slit so that a drop or two of mucilage could be emitted when the bottle was pressed to the surface of your construction-paper or doily project. Actually, the slit regularly became caked and occluded and the hardened mucilage had to be scraped off with your fingernails. It was a lot like nose-picking.  

LePage’s Mucilage, I believe it was called. We said Page as "page" but surely LePage's Mucilage if pronounced Frenchly (le pahje) would be far more euphonious. Some claim that if you were building a model airplane, you would use mucilage on your fuselage, but I believe such an assertion to be the kind of persiflage at which I take umbrage. 

And yes, the word is a descendant and cousin of Latin mucus, meaning mucus.

Unbeknownst to 1940s me, mucilage has a life outside the bottle. It is a glycoprotein and exopolysaccharide found in most plants where it helps to store water and thicken membranes. I have now learned that the sticky stuff on the leaf tips of the insect-catching sundews that live at the edge of our pond is a form of mucilage. 

I would be curious to know from what plants William Nelson LePage distilled the vast vats of mucilage that were diluted and parceled out to schoolchildren, who then spent the hour after "Arts and Crafts" removing nasty mucilage scale from their fingers. But I do now know why schools loved the stuff  -- because vegetable mucilage is, if not exactly edible, not poisonous either. No hoofs were harmed during its production.

Once having established the mucilage monopoly, Mr. LePage must have brought home zillions. And if his descendants were as sticky-fingered as I suspect they must have been, they will be enjoying the profits on their yachts or in their Manhattan penthouses to this day while we 1940s pupils are left with only memory-traces of mucilage's peculiar feel and odor.  

Other words of my life:

slouch,

cishet,

yips

ramps

jot and tittle

worship

hack

 

A "Word Problem"

If one 4 1/2 year old grandson can launch five foot stream of urine from where he stands to the base of a tree, how many 80-year-old grandfathers would it take to equal the performance?

Some answers:  a) 20 (tag team line of grampas each contributing 4").  b) does it count if I hurl my Depends?  c) I know the answer but I forgot. 

Sexual Dimorphism -- What's the point?

By all rights I should have been attending to the intricate areas of my face while shaving, but I lapsed into a reverie. My obsession of the moment--the beard. Why? Why in the world do human males grow hair on their faces? What's the point? The beard is completely valueless except to Gillette and Schick and now Harry. 

If the beard had a genuine function and if it honestly kept a person warm in winter, then for what reason would evolution deprive the gals of equivalent protection?  

Do bearded males garner a larger share of the nubile maidens than the shaved and beardless? Or a disproportionate share of the wealth? I know of no evidence that they do so. The fact that most men shave their beards argues that beards lack power or function. 

It's sexual dimorphism without purpose or logic. My guess--and it's only a guess--is that the beard-gene clung to a gene with a useful male purpose a couple of hundred thousand years ago and never let go. Accidental hirsuteness.

I suppose that there are times when sexual dimorphism can be useful. Those magnificent manes sported by the lions of the Serengeti certainly make a formidable statement--noli me tangere and by the way remember to keep your paws off the the ladies in my harem. I can see that--but then, the males of the enormous extinct European lion managed without a ruff, as do Bengal tigers. 

The gorgeous display of the male peacock is exuberant but inessential--more subtle birds manage to signal their gender and their availability without such a prodigious waste of resources. 

I should be relieved that it's only the beard that I have to worry about. Imagine if by some quirk of evolution, males of my species grew a big rack of antlers. Way more inconvenient than a mere beard. What a bother!! I can easily imagine myself lodged in a narrow doorway, or lying in bed trying to find a comfortable position while the antlers scratch the headboard, put holes in the pillow, or poke the eye of the beloved. 

Perhaps an advanced civilization would demand that we disbud the antlers at birth? Or we might go the other route and celebrate a magnificent set. We might have evolved into a society that decorated or colored or polished the antlers. "How are you wearing your antlers this winter?" "Natural brown, I think, this year, but with golden highlights." Chains of "Mr. Antler" or "Antler King" shops ("discount on sharpening this week only"). And for guys declined into the vale of years--prosthetic antlers. 

Better a beard than antlers. Definitely.

Advice for Writers

One of this blague's more inquisitive readers is a talented young journalist who knows that before Vivian de St. Vrain morphed into Dr. Metablog, he had spent a lifetime either bent unproductively over the ball point or wearily pounding on the word-processor. The young reader has asked this question:  what have decades of practice taught you, Dr. M., about the craft of writing?  And in response, Dr. M. has peered soulwise and discovered -- not a heck of a lot.

Yet in all fairness, the curious reader's question is flattering and deserves a response. And therefore Dr. M. has pondered and pondered and has now refined the drossy deposits that clog his brainal synapses into as much wisdom as he feels qualified to dispense. (Let us be clear -- the advice that follows is not meant to be argumentative or prescriptive or know-it-all. Different writers do things in different ways. The precepts that are offered here may not apply to all writing; they describe only the Way of the Metablog.) 

Let us assume that the seeker of advice brings to the table intelligence and information and a point of view -- but needs a little coaching on tactics. Point one:            

Just as I respect the first tenet of real estate -- location, location, location -- so I subscribe to the most important (but often neglected) rule of writing, which is

A)  plot, plot, plot, plot, plot. The writer must tell a story. People relish stories, respond to narrative, and are most engaged when they pursue a plot's twists and turns. Just because it's non-fiction, doesn't mean that the story-teller's bag of tricks cannot be accessed. Fortunately, every piece of prose from the briefest anecdote to the most convoluted intellectual argument can and should be structured as a narrative. In non-fiction, the first rule of plotting is to "establish the enigma." The enigma need not be a formal question, but it's indisputable that every essay answers either an explicit or an unspoken question. Is not every writer free to shape that implicit inquiry to his own purposes? And in the process of delivering an answer, is he not also free to sprinkle clues (some of them red herrings) along the path? And also at liberty to let his readers dangle until the moment comes to gratify their curiosity--and while they dangle, to let them endure suspense; suspense that can be intensified by teasing the reader about what's going to happen next? And every once in a while, to spring a surprise by veering off on an unanticipated or even misleading tangent? Nor is there anything wrong with the judicious flashback, the flash forward, or the deceptive digression -- tricks of the trade that have won the laurel since the bronze age, centuries before the time when "establish the enigma" became the watchword. Remember: "all writing is fiction, especially non-fiction." 

Connoisseurs of storytelling know that the most indispensable element in any narrative is climax. Because climax is so essential, it must be exploited to the full, not just on the universal level but also on the particular, and therefore      

B)  every sentence should achieve climax. As a general rule, the climax should come in the sentence's last phrase, or better still, in its final climactic word. The crucial, contributing part of every sentence, the idea which it strives to convey, the very target of its forward motion, should, whenever artistically feasible, come dead last. When this precept is honored, each sentence becomes an arrow aimed at its own natural target. And it follows as night the day, that every paragraph should also come to climax--and that the climax of the paragraph should be its own last sentence. So designed, sentences and paragraphs carry within them both the exciting pressure of forward motion and also coherence of argument. There's an ancillary benefit: when a sentence terminates in a climax, transitions become less awkward, because the intellectual content (or logic) of sentence B begins just where sentence A left off, and the logic of sentence C starts where B concludes. Sentences and logic coalesce and become as one. This maxim, true for sentences, is even more true for paragraphs. And therefore it follows that a practiced writer, making deft use of climax, can easily 

C)  avoid ungainly mechanical transitions, such as "nevertheless," "moreover, "on the other hand," and even that offensive bit of pop neojargonianism, "having said that" -- for these fillers are words that constrict the thoroughfare of thought. Of course there will be times when such connectives usefully signal a switch in direction, but for the most part, transitions between sentences and paragraphs should not be mechanical, i.e. by the use of conjunctive phrases and adverbs, but logical. Logical transitions need not rely on distracting howevers, however easy and tempting it might be to employ them. The best transitions are transparent or, even better, invisible. If a writer studies his sentences and is compelled to admit that they are only linked by banausic connectives, then he must judge whether the argument he offers is truly coherent or whether its logical weaknesses have been plastered over with rhetorical flimflammery. Any writer who wants his prose to be persuasive will profit by examining his connectives. And while the writer is engaged in such scrutiny, he should also check to see that he has

D)  transferred important concepts from nouns and adjectives into verbs. And by verbs, I mean verbs of vigor--not copulatives, passives, or colorless neutral words like seem, appear, make, or do. I mean verbs with punch, or better still, verbs that punch. In revising a sentence, it's a good idea to determine whether it's the nouns and their modifiers that bear the brunt of the argument. If they are doing more than their fair share of the labor, then it is mandatory to reconfigure the sentence so that the verbs strain and lift and carry. A paragraph rich in colorful verbs is active and infectious and engaging; a paragraph loaded with nouns and modifiers can be clotted and static. Strong verbs keep things moving. They keep the plot in gear. They add grit and heft. And so does the related process whereby

E)  generalizations and abstractions are replaced by instances and examples. Let me provide an example. A friend, a large man who has always savored his sauce Bearnaise, wrote this sentence to me: "My doctor--an Asian woman who weighs about fifteen pounds--has been hectoring me about my reluctance to subsist on twigs and grasses." What an excellent sentence -- not just because of the colorful verbs ("hector," "subsist"), the ironic faux-hyperbole ("about fifteen pounds") or the fact that the sentence rises to a splendid climax, but because of the specificity of "twigs and grasses." A lesser writer might have, instead of "subsist on twigs and grasses," employed a bland formula such as "go on a diet" or "become a vegetarian." But by using the concrete "twigs and grasses" for the abstract "diet" or "vegetarian," my correspondent has not only caught our attention and amused us, but he has created a metaphor. "Twigs and grasses" is specific and visual and memorable. While these nouns stand for "diet" and "vegetarian," they also stand for whatever penumbra of meaning my friend's readers bring to the interpretation of these words. In my own case, it's a irresistible vision of a big guy metamorphosed into a large twitchy-nostrilled rabbit nibbling the bark of willows. Such is the paradox of the metaphor: the more specific the word, the more spacious the liberty of interpretation. Poets know this instinctively; that's why they're poets. But remember, writers: metaphor is only one of a bucketload of figures of speech. The astute writer does not limit himself to metaphor alone, but remembers to    

F)  use figures of speech of all kinds: pun, simile, alliteration, oxymoron, parataxis, hyperbole, understatement or litotes, irony, metonymy (where an individual stands for a class), synecdoche (where a part signifies the whole), aposiopesis -- I could go on and on!  It's the figure of speech that keeps things lively, that makes prose sparkle and that make readers, already enthralled with plot and dazzled by recurrent exciting climaxes, fully engage with the written word.  After all, writing has no value unless it attracts and holds the reader. And so it follows that a writer must, finally, 

G)  know and respect his readership. He must provide all the information that a reader needs to follow the argument. Yet at the same time, he must resist the temptation to be over-explicit. Let readers do some of the work. Let them complete the connections that the writer only suggests. It will keep them on their toes, make them feel intelligent, and retain their interest. And while they're so engaged, the writer might remind himself of another precept, which is to try to

H)  make syntax and logic work together. Get them on the same track. Put the main idea in the main clause, put subordinate ideas in subordinate clauses. Put the parenthetical idea in a parenthetical clause. Put parallel ideas in parallel clauses, but when ideas are not parallel, emphasize their incompatibility by using contrasting syntactic structure. Syntax is a tool. Sentences in which logic is chugging onward and syntax is all over the map can be confusing and even impenetrable. Alexander Pope said about poetry, "The sound should be an echo to the sense."  In prose, the syntax should be an echo to the sense; or rather, the sense should be an echo to the syntax; or even better, the syntax and the sense should take each other's hand and dance the same dance. And finally (and this time the "finally" is not meant to be misleading),

I)  scrutinize every word and see if it is necessary or whether it can either be omitted or made more precise. When in doubt, throw it out. Or amend it. It should be a maxim that in good writing, no one ever "walks down the street." And by "walks down the street," I certainly do not mean "walk down the street." "Walks down the street" is a metaphor for a colorless expression. Why should someone walk down the street, when he can totter, or saunter, or sashay, or hurtle, or trot, or swagger, or stagger, or promenade down an avenue, boulevard, lane, causeway, footpath, or promenade?  English overflows with words that are specific, evocative, and suggestive. Let's have fewer street-walkers and more sidewalk-promenaders. Keats said the the poet should "load every rift with ore," and so should the writer of non-fiction. But be careful not to overload; don't allow prose to slide toward the baroque. And at last

J)   feel perfectly free to ignore the canard that you were taught in grade school  --that every piece of writing needs a conclusion.  It doesn't.  As a general rule, avoid formal conclusions.

Upper West Side Then and Now

From 1965 to 1969 we lived on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Now we've returned for a month-long visit. In days of yore, we were the busy young parents pushing our baby carriage down Broadway. Now forty years more 'mature, we step aside as nannies maneuver the twins (without question there are both more nannies and more twins) around and past us.

And the eternal West Side -- has it also matured? Certainly it's a more prosperous neighborhood and a more crowded one. With scores of giant high-rise apartment houses added in the intervening years, it's become even more densely populated. Paradoxically, it's also safer. In the 1960s, received wisdom stated that to wander onto 85th Street or onto Columbus Avenue after dark was to risk death or at least a good mugging. Now the area is peaceful morning, noon and night, and newly-fashionable Columbus Avenue houses dozens of trendy ethnic restaurants. Forty years ago, it was foolish to venture across Central Park to the aristocratic East Side, where, it was rumored, there lived people who were fair-skinned and blond. Some areas of the Park, like The Ramble, were famously dangerous and were visited only by those who were itching for action. Now, single women jog without the least concern. We took advantage of the new freedom by taking frequent jaunts to the row of fabulous museums along Fifth Avenue. (In the 1960s, museums were difficult for West Siders to access but admission was free; today, they're easy to reach but the ticket prices are staggering.) In the good old days, West Side street-corners were gathering points for enterprising drug-dealers. On this visit, I didn't spot a single dealer or a single transaction. Moreover, the neighborhood used to be thick with policemen on patrol; this time, police are scarce and apparently unnecessary. Why the improvement in public safety? In a word, money. Only the rich can now afford to live on the Upper West Side, and rich people don't need to knock you down and empty your wallet. They have other fish to fry. 

There's a new feature of transportation: droves of briefcase-bearing suit-wearers are shuttled Wallstreetway in luxurious "private cars." Meanwhile, the subway is as efficient and as filthy as ever, but nowadays we pay not with tokens but with "metro cards." The New York Times, then 10 cents, is now $1.25; it has fewer columns, a larger font, and poorer writing. More changes: in yesteryear, a man shouting in public was very likely a paranoid schizophrenic; now a noisy talker has a gimmick in his ear and a cell phone and he's doing nothing more lunatic than snapping up undercapitalized mortgages. 

Dogs, here as elsewhere, are horribly indulged. One day we peeked into a "pet exercise" gymnasium and later were amused by a well-appointed van labeled "Pet Limousine." Although there are many more curs, there are fewer piles of canine poopery on the sidewalks; most dog-walkers make use of plastic bags. Thank you, dog-walkers.

Affordable supermarkets have disappeared and there are only specialty food shops where the prices are beyond astronomical. But where do the waitresses, cooks, cleaning ladies, nannies, cashiers, shop girls, bank tellers, kioskers, subway maintenance men, bus drivers, janitors, and policemen shop?  Where, in fact, do they live? Not in the neighborhood; not since the entire West Side went condo.

It's still a polyglot world, but there's much less Spanish and a lot more Russian, Chinese, Hindi and Arabic.

More novelties: there's a Duane Reade (sometimes two) on every street and there's a second crowded Starbucks visible from the Starbucks where you sit poring over your wireless laptop and nursing your gigantico skinny dry vanilla latte. In the 1960s, there were seven movie theaters within walking distance -- including the New Yorker and the Thalia, the mother churches of cinema worship. Now, there are none -- nor even a single dvd rental store. It's all Netflix and downloads.

There's been a phenomenal growth of personal services: not just the barbershops and hairdressers of old, but also whole galaxies of nail care shops. Who could have imagined that in the new millennium, fingernails would become the cornerstone of the economy? An economy of which I'm not a part; my nail care consists of occasionally biting off a sliver of stray keratin and taking a cosmetic nibble or two at the paronychium. I don't believe I've spent a nickel, lifetime, on my nails, nor do I intend to do so. Nope, no manicures, nor pedicures, nor medicures (what the heck is a medicure?) nor massages nor aromatherapy for me. Nor will I have my ears candled (a process that one medical website calls 'useless and dangerous") or my eyebrows threaded or any part of my body, public or private, waxed. It appears that every facial feature and every organ has an entire industry dedicated to its hygiene and its remediation. Is the upper West Side experiencing an outbreak of good health? Or a triumph of narcissism?

One final observation: since we lived here, many expensively-architected fancy-shmancy private schools have appeared. Meanwhile, public schools have been allowed to slide further into poverty. Ugly, concrete block buildings surrounded by chainlink fence and razor wire -- not temples of learning, but prisons.The gap between rich and poor, evident then, has become a chasm. Manhattan is safer and more livable than it was (at least for the prosperous), but it will not be truly healed until its citizenry moves beyond "private wealth and public squalor."

Prayer Science

According to The New York Times (3/31/2006), the world of prayer science is all in a dither. A new study has apparently demonstrated that "prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery." The study was a big, expensive deal: ten years of work at a cost of $2.4 million (contributed by the ever-zealous Templeton Foundation, a powerful supporter of prayer research). The details are utterly and weirdly fascinating. "Researchers monitored 1802 patients at six hospitals who received coronary bypass surgery. The patients were broken into three groups. Two were prayed for; the third was not. Half of the patients who received the prayers were told that they were being prayed for; half were told that they might or might not receive prayers. The researchers asked the members of three congregations -- St. Paul's Monastery in St. Paul; the Community of Teresian Carmelites in Worcester, Mass.; and Silent Unity, a Missouri prayer ministry near Kansas City -- to deliver the prayers, using the patients' first names and the first initials of their last names. The congregations were told that they could pray in their own way, but they were instructed to include the phrase "for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications.'" The shocking result: "researchers found no difference between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not." Prayer, it would appear (or intercessory prayer as this variety is called), does not change things. 

I admire the dedicated men and women of science who put heart and soul into this project, but with all due respect, I must question both their conclusions and their protocols. For starters, the inference that prayer doesn't work is far too broad. Inasmuch as the scientists engaged only Christians to pray, all that they proved was that Christian prayer doesn't work. It's marvelously ethnocentric to suggest that just because Christians tanked, other religions could not succeed. It was Bailey Smith, the President of the Southern Baptist Convention, who authoritatively proclaimed that "God does not hear the prayer of a Jew." And yet, in a stunning theological upset, the scientific evidence now proves that God Almighty does not hear the prayers of Christians. But such a conclusion is itself far too hyperbolic. In actual fact, all that the study established is that God did not hear the prayers of three particular groups of prayer-providers. It's certainly a black mark against the Teresian Carmelites and their friends, and it will be a cold day in hell before they see another Templeton prayer contract, but there's nothing to say that Southern Baptists, even Bailey Smith himself, with his private line to the Almighty, might not have had more sway with the Great Jehovah.

If the researchers had not been so blindly and thoughtlessly ethnocentric, they might have solicited the prayers of people of various faiths, especially those praying to different gods. Or even better: they might have assembled disparate groups of prayer providers. In one set, for example, there would be a Catholic, a Jehovah's Witness, and a Hindu; in another, a Muslim, a Wiccan, and a Methodist; in a third, a Scientologist, a Baptist, and a Muggletonian. Although the number of possible permutations is intimidating, the cause is noble: to determine impartially which of these groups can best cut the prayer mustard. It's wrong to put the entire burden on Christians. Scientists need to mix and match the various religions so that they can discover the most effective synergistic combination, or as it might better be called, the appropriate prayer cocktail.

In addition, the study is guilty of flagrant mishandling of dosage. There was simply no control over the amount of prayer that was administered. Just as traditional medicines come in cubic centimeters, prayer comes in units of time. Let's say that one person praying for one minute yields one prayer unit.  Pending further study, there's no way to establish exactly how many prayer units a heart patient might need. For a bypass, fifty prayer units might be a minimum dosage, but perhaps twice or three times as many units might be necessary to alleviate the symptoms of a hallucinator of witches, extraterrestrials, or other supernatural beings. It's entirely possible that the prayers in this study failed simply because they didn't meet a minimum prayer-unit threshold. Moreover, it's important not to over-prescribe. For all we know, excessive prayer might precipitate iatrogenic illnesses. And it's also a question of efficiency: once an optimum dosage can be established, prayer providers can go about their business and not waste their time generating superfluous and expensive prayer units.

Moreover, prayer scientists seem to have given no serious consideration to the group power of prayer providers. Given the present abysmal state of prayer science, it's still unknown whether prayers are more effective when delivered by just one or a very few providers, or in large choruses. Jews seem to think that a minyan, or quorum, is ten, but hard science has not confirmed this number. It's therefore imperative to experiment with different size groups in order to establish a proper medical-minyan. This is not easy, or inexpensive, but it's essential.  It would indeed be unfortunate if it turns out that a thousand prayer providers are necessary to improve the condition of just one bypass patient, but good golly, the Ancient of Days works in mysterious ways, and it's not for us to question His prayer needs.

There are some other areas in which more scientific rigor is required. A)  different diseases: just because prayer didn't work for bypasses doesn't mean it won't work for scrofula. Perhaps some diseases are more prayer-responsive than others. B) fervor: prayer science has made the naive error of assuming that all prayer providers are equal. Yet the unalterable laws of random distribution determine that some people will pray more effectively than others. In point of fact, it's entirely likely that some prayer providers will be more effective with one disease than another. If I were a patient, I'd be mighty bent out of shape (and might even seek legal recourse) if I were assigned a prayer provider who had a proven track record with ulcers but who amounted to zilch for my hip replacement.  C) identification: prayer providers were given only the first name and initial of their prayee. But "Bob S." is entirely too vague-- there might be hundreds of "Bob S"'s all over the world undergoing bypass surgery at any given time. How the blue blazes is the Lord of Hosts supposed to know which particular "Bob S" is meant?  Fortunately, there's an easy solution to this problem. Prayer providers should continue to pray for Bob S., but just remember to add the last four digits of his social security or major credit card number. 

I'm not the only person disappointed with this study. According to the Times, "Bob Barth, the spiritual director of Silent Unity, the Missouri prayer ministry, said the findings would not affect the ministry's mission. 'A person of faith would say that this study is interesting,' Mr Barth said, 'but we've been praying a long time and we've seen prayer work, we know it works, and the research on prayer and spirituality is just getting started.'"  Bob B's assertion that "prayer works" is anecdotal thinking and has absolutely no merit whatsoever, but I can't imagine a single person who wouldn't agree with him that prayer science is "just getting started"-- and also that it has a long bumpy road to travel. Fortunately, the Bush administration invested over $2 million of our tax revenues in prayer research, with more in the pipeline, so some revolutionary breakthroughs in the spiritual sciences soon might be achieved.  We'll be waiting.

What We Read in the Fifties: The Return of the Native

In Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878), Clym Yeobright and Eustacia Vye are brimming with impetuous youthful lust. They meet at a deserted spot on Egdon Heath -- a “vast tract of unenclosed wild” in southwestern England. Here’s how Hardy describes their moment of passion:   

 

          “’My Eustacia.’

          ‘Clym dearest’

          They remained long without a single utterance, for no language could reach the level of their  condition: words were as the rusty implements of a bygone barbarous epoch, and only to be occasionally tolerated.

          ‘I began to wonder why you did not come,’ said Yeobright when she had withdrawn a little from his embrace.”

 

Instead of the eager hands and tongues that a modern novelist would supply, Hardy substitutes a sentence about the inadequacies of language. Even so mild an allusion to physical pleasure was shocking to Victorian moralists, who regularly rebuked Hardy for ‘vulgarity.’ Hardy’s last and best novel, Jude the Obscure, was derided as Jude the Obscene.

 

I myself had no idea that Hardy was a breaker of sexual taboos when I first read The Return of the Native in 1955. During the fifty intervening years, I’ve read almost every one of Hardy’s many books, some of them--Jude the Obscure in particular—repeatedly and with great admiration. Why did I not revisit The Return of the Native until this past week? The silly truth is that the novel was required reading in English class, and inasmuch as I was an alienated and unhappy high school student, I made it a point of honor to dislike assigned books.

 

There’s also a second and more substantive reason:The Return of the Native was truly disorienting for provincial city kids like myself simply because so much of it turns on landscape. The novel is all about the way various characters respond to Egdon Heath, a furze-covered “somber stretch of rounds and hollows,” that is isolated, extensive, unchanging, brooding, dotted with primeval pagan barrows, and populated by sheep, shepherds and heath-croppers. To understand Hardy’s Wessex landscape,I would have had to overcome two barriers: my appalling lack of imagination and my inexperience with geography. Perhaps some of my classmates could visualize Egdon Heath. Many of them came from families that owned automobiles, and had consequently voyaged beyond city limits. They had looked upon an expanse of land larger than a baseball field and upon feathered bipeds more exotic than the flocks of pigeons that guanoed the steps of the Newkirk Avenue subway station. 

 

Had I been less put off by unfamiliar scenery and less hostile to assigned texts, I might have recognized that sparse Egdon and my crowded concrete neighborhood had much in common. Both places were backwaters untouched by modernity. Neither offered much in the way of education -– either individuals who possessed any, or schools that were genuinely dedicated to providing it. My territory, like Egdon Heath, was a place which anyone who happened to prosper, even a little, speedily abandoned -- to the port city of Budmouth in Hardy’s world, and to “the island,” that is, the new prosperous suburbs of Queens and Nassau, in mine.

 

In the 1950s, I myself had only one big idea -- that there must be a world elsewhere. Why then did I not sympathize with Eustacia Vye, whose sole and only desire is to get herself away from Egdon?  She is as out of her element treading aimlessly on the heath as I felt myself to be when I bicycled an endless series of claustrophobic streets. More to the point, why didn’t I identify with the reddleman Diggory Venn? Diggory lives alone in his spring-van and wanders the heath selling reddle (a red dye used for marking sheep). If I had been capable of reading imaginatively, I would have taken Diggory to heart. He is Romanticism’s archetypical outsider and a character whom I should or could have recognized as a fellow sufferer. I too was solitary, introspective, and on a quest for knowledge, but these traits were not understood –- as I understand them now -- as healthy questioning but instead were stigmatized as psychological disability (“Why are you moping? Why is your nose always in a book?”) An understanding of Diggory Venn might have lent dignity and historical context to my private woes.

 

Even more to the point: there I was, awash with the imperious hormones of adolescence, and yet unable to notice that, although reticent about gropings and thrustings, The Return of the Native attaches enormous importance to sex. While I was mesmerized by the superficiality of Blackboard Jungle and suchlike novels, I somehow failed to observe that Thomas Hardy was very very serious about love and lust, loyalty and betrayal, passion and jealousy — and that The Return of the Native challenges its readers to acknowledge that sexuality was as dangerous as it was redemptive. Was there a more important lesson for me to have learned? Did my sixteen-year-old self catch the least glimmer of it? Not the slightest.

The P. S. 217 "Assembly"

During the 1940s and early 1950s, when I was a pupil at P. S. 217, the school auditorium was given over to formal weekly "assemblies." Boys were required to wear white shirts and green ties (girls had a specified outfit as well, but in those days I was so unconscious of a) girls and b) their costumes that I'm darned if I can remember what was worn by the young ladies). Before entering the auditorium, classes lined up in "size places." P. S. 217 was particularly strong on "size places" -- a point of particular humiliation for me, because I was, as WS says about R of G, "so long a-growing, and so leisurely" that I was by far the smallest child in every class from first grade to eighth. After we found our assigned seats (boys in one row, girls in the next), our principal Miss Bildersee, a formidable and incredibly ancient woman with nostrils so huge and distended that an agile boy could go spelunking in them, would perform the mandatory reading from the Bible. Blessings on her fond old heart, Miss Bildersee regularly choose melodious passages from the book of Psalms. I was particularly struck by the eloquence of "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful," with its abrupt counterbalancing antistrophe: "the ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away." After the Bible reading and some announcements, there was usually a performance of some sort. Choral readings, the oddest of art forms, were far too frequent. I remember that I was once a member of a sextet of quavering sopranos who memorized and recited the patriotic World War I poem "In Flanders Fields." What in the world was a second-grader supposed to make of "We are the Dead. Short days ago/ We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,/Loved and were loved, and now we lie/In Flanders fields./Take up our quarrel with the foe:/To you from failing hands we throw/The torch; be yours to hold it high./If ye break faith with us who die/ We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/ In Flanders fields." (Such poppycock was received as true literary greatness. It would have been beyond utopian imagination that our teachers would have known or introduced us to the distinguished WWI poetry of Wilfred Owen or Isaac Rosenberg or Siegfried Sassoon or Edward Thomas.) Then our music specialist Mrs. Georgia Keiselbach would sit down at the piano and teach us songs, some of them also left over from the first World War:  "Keep the home-fires burning,/ While your hearts are yearning,/ Though your lads are far away/ They dream of home;/ There's a silver lining/Through the dark cloud shining,/Turn the dark cloud inside out,/Till the boys come home." And also: "Give me some men who are stout-hearted men/ Who will fight for the right they adore... Shoulder to shoulder, and bolder and bolder."  And: "Tramp, tramp, tramp along the highway/Tramp, tramp, tramp, the road is free...  We're planters and Canucks/ Virginians and Kentucks/Captain Dick's own Infantry/ Captain Dick's own Infantry," which I now know to have come from Victor Herbert's Naughty Marietta (1910) and which provoked a great deal of surreptitious tittering because it had the word "dick" in it. In those unenlightened days we sang very many overtly religious songs: "White Christmas" and "Silent Night" and "Easter Parade." I much admired the tune of "The First Noel" but I had no idea what was meant by "born is the king of Israel" -- the only Israel I knew of was a recently-founded democracy. I loved the Thanksgiving hymn "We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing;/ He chastens and hastens His will to make known;/ The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing,/ Sing praises to His name; He forgets not his own" and many more stanzas, none of which I could parse or understand (still can't, in fact!). Another Thanksgiving song: "Over the river and through the woods/ To grandmother's house we go/The horse knows the way/To carry the sleigh...," which I found to be curiously disorienting because my particular grandmother lived in a tiny third-floor walkup on noisy and sweaty Coney Island Avenue. We sang the immensely mysterious Lord's Prayer (in the Schubert setting, I later discovered). Why did we so?  Were the heathens and Jews among us expected to convert on the spot? I much preferred the patriotic songs, although even they too were permeated with inexplicable theology. We were fervent jingos.   Not one, but two full stanzas of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic": "In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,/With a glory in His bosom, that transfigures you and me/ As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,/ For God is marching on." And two stanzas also of "The Star-Spangled Banner": "Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand/ Between their loved home and the war's desolation!/ Blessed with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land/ Praise the Power that hath made and preserv'd us a nation./Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,/ And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'" I preferred the rousing "O Columbia! the gem of the ocean,/ The home of the brave and the free,/ The shrine of each patriot's devotion,/ A world offers homage to thee" and "God Bless America" as well as the jingoist exceptionalism and cluttered syntax of "Our father's God, to thee/ Author of liberty/ To thee we sing./  Long may our land be bright/ With freedom's holy light;/ Protect us by thy might/ Great God our King." 

Here's a song we were distinctly not taught and did not sing: "This land is your land, this land is my land/ From California, to the New York Island./ From the redwood forest, to the Gulf Stream waters/ This land was made for you and me." We especially did not sing: "In the squares of the city  -- in the shadow of the steeple/  Near the relief office -- I see my people/ And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin' /If this land's still made for you and me."

December 17.  I now remember that we sang musical settings to two familiar poems. The first, Emma Lazarus's inscription on the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore." Hey, that's my grandparents you're calling "wretched refuse." The second, Joyce Kilmer's horrid "Trees": "I think that I shall never see/  A poem lovely as a tree...  A tree who's hungry mouth is pressed/ Against the earth's sweet-flowing breast" etc.  This song was only palatable because it allowed us to say the word "breast" out loud. 

(Thanks to Steve and to Barry, graduates of P. S. 217, for jogging my memory;  thanks also to David [P. S. 102].

Graduates of P. S. 217 who happen to stumble onto this site: feel free to add comments or to forward this post to classmates with whom you might be in touch.)

Frost

When I lived in Cambridge in the first years of the 1960s, it was not unusual to encounter, on a warm winter afternoon, the poet Robert Frost walking slowly along Massachusetts Avenue. I'd watch him as he strolled over to Plympton Street and to the Grolier -- which was then as now, I imagine, the only all-poetry bookstore in America. One day I crept behind him to the shop and sat in a secluded corner, studying him as he browsed the shelf of new arrivals. With his leathery old skin and unruly iridescent white hair, he was an iconic figure -- famous not only among friends of poetry but among readers of Life and Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post. When he "said" his poems at Sanders Theater (in late 1961 or 1962), he filled every seat and every standpoint of a large auditorium. He was an honest-to-goodness celebrity, a presence, a man who had created a body of work and had earned a reputation that no poet or cultural figure today can rival.

At JFK's inauguration in January of 1961, Frost commanded a national television audience. He started to read the poem he had composed for the occasion, but his 87-year-old eyes were blinded by the bright sunlight and he couldn't continue. There was a moment of embarrassment, and I remember cringing in sympathy with his struggle. But then he gathered himself and recited from memory, in a rejuvenated voice, "The Gift Outright." "She was our land more than a hundred years/ Before we were her people." It's an almost mystical but grandly patriotic poem about rude, unlettered colonials transforming themselves into a Nation. "Such as we were we gave ourselves outright.../ To the land vaguely realizing westward,/ But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, / Such as she was, such as she would become."

Frost died in January of 1963, just ten months before our young president was shot. It's almost impossible now to reconstruct the effervescence of the Kennedy years -- a brief exciting moment between the lukewarm bland Eisenhower administration and the interminable nightmare of Vietnam. Frost's "Dedication," the poem that he couldn't read at the inaugural, is not his best work, but its last lines catch the spirit of the time. The poet took his inspiration from the Rome of Augustus and of Horace, Virgil, and Ovid. "It is no miracle the mood is high," he wrote.  "It makes the prophet in us all presage/ The glory of the next Augustan age/ Of a power leading from its strength and pride,/ Of young ambition eager to be tried,/ Firm in our free beliefs without dismay,/ In any game the nations want to play./ A golden age of poetry and power/ Of which this noonday's the beginning hour." Frost proved to be a better poet than a prophet. Instead of a golden age of poetry and power, we've had, after the three horrible murders, a parade of fools: first the crook, then the senile puppet, then the congressional fellatio hunters, and now the smirking, dangerous dunce. 

Like the nation, I too am in steep decline. It used to be that I could memorize short poems with ease. Nowadays, it's a titanic effort of will. To forestall hardening of the mind, and in a desperate effort to keep my brain supple, I decided to memorize Frost's "Birches." It's when you learn a poem by heart that you truly appreciate it, and so I can now say with absolute confidence and authority that "Birches" is a poem not just for the age, but for all time. In point of fact, I've been bothering myself about how Frost will fare in civilizations as far into the future as Virgil and Horace are in our past. Will students of poetry be able to grasp the subtlety of "Birches?" The story, the plot itself, will pose no problem. Frost knows that birches are bent to the ground by ice-storms, but he would fancifully "prefer to have some boy bend them/ As he went out and in to fetch the cows." For the "boy," tree-climbing is a high art: "He always kept his poise/ To the top branches, climbing carefully/ With the same pains you use to fill a cup/ Up to the brim, and even above the brim." Frost then shifts perspective, and the fantasy that birches are bent not by ice-storms but by athletic youngsters transforms into a memory, a truth: "So was I once myself a swinger of birches;/ And so I dream of going back to be." He closes the poem with a vision in which he leaves the real world and starts life anew: "I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,/ And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk/ Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,/ But dipped its top and set me down again." Even though our descendants will read the poem in an extinct language and in an edition encrusted with explanatory footnotes, I'm sure that they'll understand its outline. (I imagine too that some future scholar will make his career by explicating the line "A boy too far from town to learn baseball.") But will anyone in 4006 A.D. be sufficiently conversant with everyday twentieth-century American English to recognize the skill with which Frost masks his deep insights into the relationship between the material and the eternal with art-that-hides-art colloquialisms? Or appreciate to the full the sly understatement of "one could do worse than be a swinger of birches?" The beauty and the profundity of "Birches" tease us who share Frost's language. What a challenge the poem will be eighty generations down the road! Moreover, Is there even the remotest possibility that our successors will be equipped to grasp how much of Roman poetry (Ovid especially) Frost distills into "I'd like to get away from earth awhile/ And then come back to it and begin over./ May no fate willfully misunderstand me/ And half grant what I wish and snatch me away/ Not to return." Frost possessed the genius to keep us in touch with our past and to connect us to our future.

I wish that I had talked to Robert Frost that winter day when he was trudging on. "How are you, Mr. Frost," I might have asked. Perhaps he would have smiled or said "Nice day."

That would have been a good thing to recall.   

Seventy-two Virgins

It appears to be the case that martyrs of a certain persuasion will be rewarded in the afterlife with the ministrations of seventy-two virgins. It would take a theologian of extraordinary skill to explain why acts of violence should be rewarded with sexual indulgence. I raise a far less knotty question: if the aim is bliss, then why virgins?  Why not women of experience and expertise? Benjamin Franklin, the most practical of our Founding Fathers, was dogmatic on this nice point: shun the callow in favor of women who've been around the block, because "every Knack... by Practice [is] capable of improvement."  I think that B-Frank would agree that there is something about the virgins-for-martyrs deal that's kind of, how shall I say, impractical or counter-intuitive or even, dare I say, kinky.   

Here's a second theological conundrum. What is the reward when the martyr is herself female? I must presume that she will be blessed with seventy-two male virgins -- if not, there's a very serious afterlife asymmetry. Not to reward females who give themselves to the cause would be a statement that the culture of religious martyrdom does not support sexual equality, which I can hardly bring myself to believe. But in the case of female martyrs, the matter of sexual expertise is further exacerbated. Specifically, of what conceivable value are seventy-two knackless male virgins? If we postulate that each male virgin is good for between ten and fifteen seconds of actual intercourse, it follows that they will be consumed at the rate of four to six every minute, which means that on average a martyress, however patient, would enjoy a sum of only twelve or so minutes of pleasure (setting aside time for re-mounting and repositioning), which is surely insufficient exercise to produce a meaningful let alone heavenly experience.   

Nor will it be all that great for the male virgin at the end of the queue who has to settle for sloppy seventy-seconds.   

Jane Austen Nude

Today's posting is contributed by the art historian, Alan Saxe-Popette. 

Jane Austen's quiet private life has been thoroughly explored for events of emotional import. It is therefore a wonder that there has been such inattention to the portrait, identified some forty years ago,in which the novelist, nude, reclines on a green baize fainting couch. One would have supposed that writers of fiction and especially film directors would have seized on the opportunities that the portrait presents, especially since the only other surviving representation of Jane Austen is her sister Cassandra's amateurish, unflattering, and essentially asexual sketch. The Austen nude has faded inexplicably from view. Older readers of this blague will surely remember the mid-1960s flurry of journalistic interest, some of it nasty and anti-feminist -- a cover story in Time ("Did Jane Disrobe") as well as the scandalmongering reportage of Huntley and Brinkley.  But just like the revelations concerning Wordsworth's French mistress and like the notoriety that greeted Edith Wharton's pornographic short story Beatrice Palmato, the brouhaha over the Austen nude quickly evaporated.

The portrait itself, a full-length study in chalk and colored pencils, resides in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and his Circle, which is housed in Room 319 of the New York Public Library, and  may be viewed upon request. Perhaps it is unfortunate that the first account of the Austen nude appeared in the pages of the Keats-Shelley Journal, a publication sponsored by the Pforzheimer.  More scholarly attention might have been paid if the identification of the portrait had been announced in a journal of larger circulation, such as Nineteenth-Century Fiction or Romantic Studies.

The late R. W. Chapman, who knew more about Jane Austen than any scholar of his generation, resisted the idea that the portrait was genuine. His attack on its authenticity, published as an appendix to the revised edition of the Complete Works of Jane Austen, is scathing, but is rather a reflection of Chapman's Victorian prejudices than of the facts. Chapman was a traditionalist who believed that young females, even brilliant female novelists, should be, above all, decorous. His Jane Austen was a bulwark of conservative and hierarchical values and he would certainly not have recognized the modern revisionist conception that situates the novelist in an uneasy alliance with transgression and subversion. In private, moreover, Chapman was notoriously prudish. He is reported to have confessed to his great friend Kathleen Tillotson (herself a well-known scholar of English fiction) that "I just don't want to go to my grave thinking that I've looked upon dear Miss Austen's pubic hair."

In the 1960s, there was considerable resistance to the authenticity of the portrait, perhaps because, compared to Cassandra's prim drawing, the new rendering revealed a young woman in full beauty and bloom. Jane retains the familiar apple cheeks and the dark hair, but her eyes are knowing and forthright rather than subdued, and her long, glossy and loose black locks, secured only by a single cherry-colored ribbon, appear as they were described by Jane Austen's grand-niece, who recalled her aunt having "large dark eyes and a brilliant complexion, and long long black hair down to her knees." Opinions will of course vary, but many will find that in this portrait, Jane looks somewhat Italian or Gypsy or perhaps even Levantine. Her expression is eager, her waist slim, her legs short but shapely, and her breasts, despite their surprisingly large aureoles, magnificent.   

Misgivings about the portrait's authenticity survived even until the 1970s. But then it was established that the chamber in which Austen posed was the drawing room at Steventon that she shared with Cassandra. There's a useful description in Constance Hill's Jane Austen, Her Homes and Friends (1902). Hill, it is well known, had access to the Lefroy family papers. The Lefroys were important connections of the Austens. It was James Lefroy who wooed Jane and then inexplicably broke off his relationship with her and retired to Ireland. Jane's brother James Austen's daughter married a Lefroy; Jane's grand-niece Anna Lefroy, the child of this union, left a remembrance of her great-aunt's sitting room. "I remember," wrote Anna, "the common looking carpet with its chocolate ground that covered the floor, and some portions of furniture. A pointed press, with shelves above for books, that stood with its back on the wall next the Bedroom, & opposite the fireplace; my Aunt Jane's Pianoforte -- & above all, on a table between the windows, above which hung a looking glass, 2 tonbridge-ware work boxes of oval shape, fitted up with ivory barrels containing reels for silk, yard measures, etc." In the portrait, these two same oval Tunbridge work-boxes appear just to the left and behind Jane Austen's head; the keyboard of "Aunt Jane's Pianoforte" is in part visible to the right; the oval cheval-glass is exactly as Anna described it. Moreover, the ingenious young art historian Oksana Sartry, who, using powerful magnifiers, was able to identify the books in the press, discovered not only Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison and Robert Bage's Hermsprong, both novels known to have been much studied by Austen, but also a folio with the words "Volume the Second" inscribed on its spine. "Volume the Second" was the name that the novelist gave her manuscript collection of early works (which included the unfinished novel, The Watsons). With this confirmatory evidence, skepticism was at last dispelled. Austen's remark to her sister Cassandra (reporting on a day spent with James Lefroy), "imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking" took on new meaning.  And what did Jane mean when she wrote to her sister, "here I am once more in this Scene of Dissipation & vice, and I begin already to find my Morals corrupted."

What was the exact occasion for the portrait and why was it found among the Lefroy papers? There are two views. The first is that Jane sent it to James Lefroy as part of the courtship process: "here's what you get if you marry me." This explanation is certainly possible, but the greater likelihood is that it was a "revenge" portrait: "here's what you have scorned."

That the drawing has sexual content is undeniable, but it is absurd to think, as some have suggested, that Jane Austen would allow herself to be depicted in a post-orgasmic state. It is true that Jane's skin is rosy and flushed and that her plump nipples are erect, but the placement of her hand just above the tendrils of abundant black hair is traditional and would not seem to indicate that she had pleasured herself. Those who argue that Jane had recently masturbated seem, frankly, to have surrendered to prurience. I myself, after the very closest scrutiny, can discover no evidence whatsoever of what one writer has called "a clitoral cleft in arousal." Jane Austen was bold, but she would never, ever, have exceeded the bounds of modesty.

Why I Hate Machines

So I've been trying, by god, to figure out why the riding mower has been cutting on an angle, the right side leaving the grass higher than the left, and I've been crawling under the machine looking at the cutting deck from all angles and not able to understand the mechanism except it's obvious that it's not parallel to the ground, and my neighbor Ed was by and he's kind of a genius with machinery which I most definitely am not, and I said to him, Ed would you take look and see why the mower is cutting at an angle and he said, Well, here's one problem your left rear tire is flat which made me feel really dumb because I was so busy trying to understand the suspension system on the deck that I never even looked at the tire and I said, Flat, how can it be flat, I never run it anywhere but over the grass and he said, Well, look right there it's got a thorn in it, A thorn, I said, how can a thorn penetrate a Carlyle Super Tuff tire, and he said, Oh yeah they do that, but I can fix it, I'm busy today but I'll do it tomorrow I have a system you just push through what looks like knitting needle with sticky stuff on the end and pull it out, it will seal it right up, it's a tubeless tire isn't it? and I said Yes it is, and if you could fix it tomorrow that would be great, well next day he took the tire and tried it his way but he couldn't get it to hold air so he says Take it down to PTOs and they'll patch it from the inside, so I put it in the trunk of the car and drove to town and they fixed it and then I put it back on the axle, it has three small washers and one large washer and one of those spring nuts and I started the engine but by god the mower wouldn't move and I thought what the heck is going on here, I put everything back exactly as it came off and it was running just fine when I took it off so what could I possibly be doing wrong, I took the wheel off and put it on again and I still couldn't figure it out so I got in the car and drove over to Ed's, he was cutting wood but he stopped and I said, Ed, what's wrong with that lamb, why do you have him penned up all by himself and he said, you know how the lambs are always butting heads and pushing each other around, well I went out in the field and he was down, couldn't move a bit, so I took him home and I don't know whether his brains are addled or he's really hurt, I thought we'd better have him slaughtered but you can see he's doing better, getting up and eating so we'll hold off a day, and I said maybe he has a bad back like me, and he said, No, he's too young for a bad back, so I said, Well, maybe he has vertigo like you, which is not all that funny because Ed lost a week to vertigo last June, and he kind of laughed and said, Well, is your mower working now, and I said, Not exactly, the engine's fine and the belt turns but it's not moving frontwards or backwards and he said, How can that be, I'll come over and take a look so later that day he came by and sure enough it wouldn't move, so we took off the wheel again and studied it but I certainly couldn't figure it out and he couldn't either, everything looked good and perfect, we puzzled over it for a while and then he called the John Deere dealer in North Haverhill and the technician said maybe you lost the key when you took off the wheel and Ed said, O yes of course, we must have lost the key, I didn't think of that, and I said What the heck is the key and he said Well, in a lot of these machines the axle is broached which means there's a slot in it and a slot in the wheel and you have to have a key which is just a small piece of metal otherwise the axle will spin but the wheel won't rotate, so we looked all around for the lost key but couldn't find it and then Ed said, Look at your tire they didn't even mount it right, it's out of round, you'd better bring it back in and while you're there check if the key is in the shop somewhere, it might have stuck in the wheel because of the grease, so I took the wheel and put it in the trunk and drove back to PTOs and showed him that the tire was out of round, the owner was embarrassed about the bad job he had done and wouldn't even look me in the eye but he re-mounted the tire and when he finished I said, By the way, you didn't happen to find the key I lost it, and he said I'll look inside but he couldn't find it, so he said I'll make you another one which was nice of him though the key is only at most a 50 cent piece but it saved me from having to go to Napa Auto Parts or drive 30 minutes to North Haverhill to the John Deere dealer, so he made the part it took him only a couple of minutes, he had the stock he just had to cut and file a two inch piece, I brought it home and I put the key in the slot and put the wheel on, I had to use a board for a lever to get the rear of the mower up in the air and it was tricky because I held the board with my right hand and the wheel in the left but I managed alright and then I got on the tractor and started the engine and everything worked perfectly except that the tractor still wouldn't go either forward or backward, I took the wheel off and put it on again, but it still wouldn't work, so I walked over to Ed's and I said, Ed, I can't for the life of me figure it out, I got the key and it fit just perfectly but the machine still doesn't move, and he said It's got to work, it makes perfect sense, I said, Hey look, your lamb looks a lot better but why did you put a hog panel across your driveway, he said It's because of the dog, he's been getting out, tomorrow he's going to be snipped and that will quiet him down a bit, which is a good idea because the dog is far too friendly even to me and I don't particularly like the dog, he's a beagle mix, not as bad as their other dog which was a rescue dog a bulldog, very ugly in my opinion, which also got out and trotted over to the pottery down the road where he was  seen running off with the Murrays' Silkie in his mouth, a Silkie is a fancy chicken, they charged Ed a hundred and sixty dollars for vet bills and mental anguish, the chicken died anyway, so Ed got out his rifle and shot the bulldog and then dug a hole four feet deep, he said that all the way down it was nothing but powder, it's been that dry the last few weeks, anyway Ed came by again and we tried the machine and it wouldn't go forward or backward and I was about to surrender and load up the damn thing and take it back to the dealer when we lifted both back wheels off the ground and suddenly the axle which hadn't been turning even though the belt had been turning started to spin, it must have been something about the gears that didn't mesh properly anyway we put the wheel back on again and I started it up and by god it ran as good as ever but I had wasted a whole day fussing with the mower just because it had picked up a goddamn thorn probably blackberry which is in brief why I hate machines

Trump, Chaucer, etc.

Chaucer's Pardoner, some will remember, has long blonde hair and speaks in a high treble voice. Chaucer calls him "a gelding or a mare." A gelding is obviously a eunuch; what Chaucer means by mare is less clear -- perhaps "female eunuch" -- whatever that entails -- or a gay male or possibly even a woman cross-dressed as a man. In any case, a person of ambiguous sexuality -- "gender fluid" in modern idiom. 

Update: the Naval Academy Nimitz library at Annapolis has purged from its shelves a book by Robert S. Sturges called  "Chaucer's Pardoner: Gender Theory." Isn't it reassuring that our national security will no longer be endangered by a discussion of the Pardoner's identity.

The list of 381 censored books can be found at

https://media.defense.gov/2025/Apr/04/2003683009/-1/-1/0/250404-LIST%20OF%20REMOVED%20BOOKS%20FROM%20NIMITZ%20LIBRARY.PDF

Cornell English Then and Now -- 6

After struggling through a run of mysterious and puzzling works, I'm cheered to discover a book written by Cornell English faculty member that I could read with pleasure from beginning to end. And understand. And which alerted me to books and poems with which I was not familiar. No theory, no pretentious jargon; just honest scholarship and intelligent stylish analysis, 

It's Facing the Abyss, American Literature and Culture in the 1940s, by George Hutchinson, who is Cornell's Farr Professor of American Culture.

Unlike Professor Hutchinson, who is a considerably younger man, I myself was alive (although barely sentient) during the 1940s. I was too young for serious reading, so 1940s culture didn't come to my aluminum desk until the 1950s when I belatedly came to awareness. As a result, I read many of the books that Hutchinson discusses a decade past their relevance. Hutchinson also mentions many influential books that I didn't read at all and therefore came as a surprise -- and which underlined my ignorance. For example, during the 1950s, my high school and college years, I read many books of 1940s Jewish American writers to whom Hutchinson devotes a long chapter: Mailer, Bellow, Malamud, Rukeyser, Arthur Miller, etc. But my acquaintance was incomplete. I confess that I had never heard the names of Jo Sinclair or Isaac Rosenthal, both of whom Hutchinson scrutinizes at full. One name missing from Hutchinson's survey is J D Salinger, who started to publish in the 40s but only became famous with Cather in the Rye in 1951. Just as well -- I never caught Salinger fever although many of my friends were quite infected. 

Hutchinson has presented me with a reading list of books that I should have known but didn't and that will keep me engaged for months. I'm grateful.

Hutchinson's chapter on WWII is most revelatory. Without being unduly partisan, it exposes and corrects the "greatest generation" mythology that I had half come to accept. 

After reading Facing the Abyss, I continued my investigation of Cornell English faculty publications by taking a couple of wild swings at Elizabeth S. Anker's mystifying On Paradox, the Claims of Theory (Duke UP, 2022). (Anker holds a joint appointment in Cornell's law school and its Department of Literature in English.) I can say just two things for certain about this difficult book: a) I didn't understand two consecutive sentences, and b) it's not about literature, not even tangentially. In fact, I'm not sure what it's about -- as far as I can tell, it's not about the law. I have rarely attempted anything in English prose that I found quite so impenetrable. I never even grasped what Anker means by paradox.

I'm sure it's mea maxima culpa, but so be it. 

 

[April 4] PGB writes: "Every time you post something, it becomes ever clearer that you're not the right person for this investigation. Give it up and stick to something within your abilities, like basketball. You write well on basketball. Do yourself a favor: stay away from the deeper issues that Anker discusses."

[April 4]  Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Perhaps you're right, PGB (whoever you are). The shoemaker should stick to his last. This Anker book is not intended for me, but I I wonder for whom it is intended. It's got to be an extremely small specialized audience. Six or eight people, worldwide. I doubt anyone on Cornell's English faculty then or now could make heads or tails of it."

[April 6]  Artie Greengroin writes: "Thanks for hanging in there.  I hope you find other Cornell English Professors who know how to write English. I'm not optimistic, though. BTW, I think PGB is harshing on you, but I agree that your basketball essays are pretty good."

[April 8] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Thanks for the recommendation, Artie and PGB. If anyone is interested, my basketball essays are here.

[April 9]  Charles Evans (Mercer College) writes: "I agree. Vivian, your notes on basketball are quite good. But you're just not smart enough to understand philosophy."

[April 10] Joe J. Keen (Northwest Nazarene University, Nampa, Idaho) writes: "I agree with Charles Evans. The basketball entries are amusing. But, Vivian, you're no philosopher."

[April 16] Vivian de St. Vrain writes: The "Artie Greengroin" who posted on April 6 does not exist. Artie Greengroin is not a real person; he's a character invented by the WWII novelist Harry Brown. Come on, Artie you can use your real name. Don't be afraid. Don't hide behind a pseudonym. We're all friends here."

[April 30]. Chester Bacon writes: "Thanks for bringing the Hutchinson book to my attention.  I've read and been enlightened by it. But following your recommendation I'll stay away from the Anker book. And I do like your basketball essays."

Words of My Life -- Text

I first encountered the word "text" -- as did everyone else of my cohort -- as the first component of "textbook." At P S 217, textbooks were issued on the first day of school. Then, later in the day, we ritually scissored brown paper grocery bags and improvised protective book covers. It was not unusual for the covers to be in better shape than the retirement-eligible books. At college, I was surprised to find that I was required to purchase my own textbooks -- a discovery that busted a hole in my precarious budget. 

And then the word "text" sat still for a number of years until it emerged as a term of art in critical theory. "Text" became a generic word for anything written: novels, poems, plays, signs, advertising slogans, tattoos -- anything that could be analyzed and discussed. I think, in retrospect, that the idea was not to "privilege" one form of writing over another. "Text" is to poem as "provider" is to doctor.

Nowadays, "text" has emerged from the gloom of academic criticism and has become the most frequently used of words. Who could have predicted it? I myself, formerly a writer of letters and postcards and until recently of emails, and for many years at one point a user of the telephone, now send and receive multiple "texts" in a day.

The noun has also acquired a variety of verb forms: "I'll text you"; "I texted you";   "Text me when you arrive"; "Talk to you later.  I'm texting."

All derived, ultimately, from L. texere textus, to weave; or textor, a weaver.

The use of "text" in religious ceremony, as in a cleric's, "today's text is..." has never been a part of my life.

Cornell English Then and Now -- 5

Elisha Cohn is an associate professor in Cornell's Department of Literatures in English. Her Still Life, Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (2016) strikes me as two books in one. The first is quite lovely and filled with a variety of splendid apercus. Cohn explores "lyric moments" in the novels (confession: I read closely only the chapter on Thomas Hardy, the novelist with whom I'm most familiar). She observes that Hardy (a poet as well as a novelist) occasionally stops the progress of the story and allows his characters to experience a moment of stasis or reflection or reverie that is more a characteristic of lyric poetry than prose. I was much impressed by her analyses of these moments -- and wondered why I had failed to notice such events -- or non-events -- myself. So criticism did what it's supposed to do -- widens our understanding and appreciation of works of literature. I returned to the Victorian novel armed with a new way of seeing. In fact, I'm now reading Little Dorrit again for the express purpose of ascertaining whether a non-poet like Dickens employs the same Still Life method. So far, not the case -- Dickens has his own particular (and very successful) methods of expanding the consciousness of his characters.

Ah, but then there's the other side of Cohn's book which attempts to develop her useful insights within the slough of "theory." I half suspect that Cohn felt obliged to make herself relevant or contemporary or tenure-worthy with her tumble into this quicksand -- but perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps she devoutly believes in an apparatus that I find so incomprehensible and transient. In this second part of the book, many famous names are invoked and admired; some of these are very French and very revered; others  are merely professors at American universities. Pages of text and footnotes defend against the horrid possibility that Still Life might be "insufficiently theorized." And in these speculative paragraphs Cohn discusses the deprivilegization of hierarchical thought in favor of forms of lateralization in which individuations are impersonal and singularities are pre-individual and which reterritorialize along the lines of preexisting structures of power which re-consolidate into static concepts, etc., etc. Which is when I either descend into a reverie (or nightmare) of my own or hurl he book across the room.

 

[February 23  Audrey ap Howell writes:  "Vivian de St. Vrain, you've go it wrong. The notion that there are poetic moments in the novels is well established. The originality of this book lies in its theorizing of these moments. You would know this if you had read carefully and not skimmed." 

[February 24] J C Occhiogrosso writes: "This is a well-written book. Complicated but not obscure."

[February 25]  Reuben Musgrave writes:  "I bet that Cohn is a delightful teacher -- if she keeps to the events in the novels and stays away from bewildering 'theory.'"

[February 25] Savannah Courtermanche writes:  "All novelists pause the plot for moments of reflection. Nothing new here."    

[March 5]  Joy Jourgenson writes:  "This difficult monograph would have been more useful as a series of short, insightful essays.  Too bad it had to be expanded into a repetitive static book. Not the author's fault -- just the tune of the times."

[March 6]  Eli Munn writes:  "Vivian, you're too old and out of it to have an opinion worth anything. Shut it down and go back to your knitting."

[March 15] Rogers Roggen writes:  "I wonder, Vivian, how you can work yourself up into such a snit about Cornell when the USA is going to hell in a handbasket. Shouldn't you put your effort into more pressing matters."

[March 18] Homer vanNess writes:  "Reuben Musgrave, are you possibly the "Cousin Rube" that I heard my parents mention? I know there's a Musgrave branch to my family. (I found your name doing a random googlesearch). If you are Cousin Rube, could you pm me at [email protected]. I'd love to hear from you. I think you went to Cornell; so did I but much later."

 

Cornell English Then and Now - 4

Vivian de St. Vrain writes: "Cathy Caruth is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of English at Cornell University. She has written quite a number of books but the one that I selected for this Cornell English Department project, partly because of its engaging title, is Literature in the Ashes of History. Alas, the title is misleading, because Caruth doesn't concern herself with literature in any recognizable way. Rather, the book investigates psychoanalytic theories, especially of loss and trauma. Although in an earlier part of my life I read and studied all of Freud's major works, I found this book to be far too subtle and abstruse for my downright brain. I have therefore asked assistance from my long time friend A. Barnett Langdale, Jr. Barney is a very smart medical school graduate, a therapist, and psychologist (though not a psychoanalyst) and a person for whose opinions I have great regard."

A. Barnett Langdale, Jr., writes: "Thanks, Viv, for entrusting me with the of task of reading and evaluating this book. I fear that I shall disappoint you, because I had a hard time understanding Literature in the Ashes of History. In order to profit from reading this book, one must accept certain assumptions about Sigmund Freud and about the art of psychoanalysis. Caruth sets out to modify and reinterpret the famous fort-da episode in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This became an immediate problem for me, because I have never agreed with Freud's analysis of his grandson's play -- perhaps because his interpretation clashes with what I have  learned from long years of closely observing children in my professional practice. Events such as fort-da can generate a spectrum of meanings and a variety of interpretations equally as valid or invalid as Freud's. As I result, I read this book with a great deal of resistance to its assumptions and their ramifications.

Many of the arguments that Caruth creates ("suggests" is her usual verb) are too arcane for me. She carries her readers away from common sense. She inhabits an intellectual world in which every event or fact carries its own negation. And that negation bears a consequent negation, and so on ad infinitum, like the images in a pair of opposed mirrors, leading inevitably to a situation in which, as Macbeth says, "function/ Is smothered in surmise and nothing is/ But what is not."

Vivian de St. Vrain responds: 'Many thanks, Barney. In the course of reading Literature in the Ashes of History, I came to think that its procedure is, in a sense, a lot like theology. If you make certain assumptions about god and angels and creation, you can generate a fantastically complicated superstructure of ideas that has absolutely no relations to the world in which we dwell. This book is not theology, it's psychoanalytic theory, but it shares a similar procedure, because, despite its highly-elaborated complexity, its assumptions are unprovable if not absolutely false. Intelligence and sophistication can take you only so far. I'm afraid that in the end, there's no more heft in this kind of study than there is in theology -- the "subject without an object." Ultimately, it's Cloud-Cuckoo-Land." 

 

 

[February 15] Walter Balletto writes: "Before you dismiss this intelligent book out of hand, you might want to read the ecstatic review by Michael Levine in The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis. It's online. Levine makes the effort to read carefully, which neither you nor your friend Langdale do."  

[February 15] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "At first I thought that Mr. Balletto was being ironic, inventing an improbable self-parodic name for an academic journal. Who would believe there is actually such a publication? But I looked it up and, by golly, it's real. Moreover, it's published, mirabile dictu, by the University of Nebraska Press!!!"

[February 16] Janet Rich asks: "You haven't said anything about Caruth's presence in a Department of English. Shouldn't she relocate to Psychology?"

[February 16] Herbert Lecovin (Cornell '61) asks: "I wonder how many of Caruth's colleagues can read and understand her work?"

[February 16] Anita Robillard writes: "Caruth is on an island, and instead of welcoming friends to join her, she erects walls and barricades to keep them out."

[February 17] Joel Salzberg writes: "What do you mean by "island." She teaches at Cornell; Cornell's not an island."

[February 17] Anita Robillard writes: "It's a metaphor, Joel."

[February 17] Herman S. Levi writes: "I don't understand why you compare psychoanalysis to theology. They're nothing alike."

[February 18] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Professor Levi, let me refer you to a familiar passage in the Leviathan, where Hobbes writes of "names that signifie nothing, but are taken up and learned by rote from the Schooles, as hypostatical, transubstantiate, consubstantiate, eternal-Now and the like canting of Schoolemen." Similarly, the words of psychoanalysis, such as pleasure principle, Ego, etc. signify nothing at all. Theologians and psychoanalysts can be very smart people, but the net practical result of their involuted speculation is transitory, wrong, useless, specious, and false."

[April 1]  Skye Barasch writes:  So, Vivian, is there anyone on the Cornell English faculty whose work meets your antiquated approval?  It's all bad, according to you.

[April 1]  Vivian de St, Vrain responds: Actually, Ms/Mr Barasch, I'm just about to add a paragraph on a member of the faculty whose book was very informative and comprehensible. No abstruse jargon, I'm glad to say.  Stay tuned;  my comments will appear here in a day or two. I do wonder, now that I think of it, if I'm unconsciously picking the least approachable books to report on. I'll try to mend my ways.

Cornell English Then and Now -- 3C

I'm a lifelong fan of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. I love all the shipboard stuff, the adventure, the exoticism, Crusoe's self-reliance, his  psychological complexity, his religious ponderings, and especially the recapitulation of nascent capitalism on the island. I'm as entranced as ever by the attempt to domesticate goats, by his attempt to build a boat, by the single footprint on the beach, by Friday's escape and the battle with the cannibals. With a little effort, I have been able to set to one side the novel's faults: the author's careless repetitions, his appalling colonialist racism, those last anticlimactic adventures and the return to England, the unnatural absence of sexuality or passion, the paranoia and the unnecessary violence. Massive defects, yes indeed, but Robinson Crusoe is still a great eternally wonderful mishmash of a novel. 

So it came as a surprise to read Laura Brown's one-sentence summary of the novel in The Counterhuman Imaginary: "Robinson Crusoe enacts a self-creative other-than-human vitality by setting matter in motion through the persistent repetition of irresistible succession."  

Maybe Robinson Crusoe does "enact" and "set matter in motion" -- I don't know, can't say. But I do not plan to undergo the pain and woe of making sense out of her ungainly and mystifying sentence. For Laura Brown, Robinson Crusoe is not the pleasure and challenge that it has been for three hundred years -- it's just raw material for her dry-as-dust ideological machine.

And a waste of my precious time.

 

[February 1] Bernhard Starr writes:  "Brown transforms the gold of literature into the dross of criticism."

[February 1] Professor Merlon Crenelle, Southwestern Louisiana U., writes: "Vivian, you're totally unfair. You take one sentence out of the chapter and make fun of it. You don't even bother to see how the sentence is related to the larger argument. You owe Professor Laura Brown an apology. You're irresponsible."

[February 1] Marianne Morrison, Ph. D. writes: "Vivian, I agree with Mr. (Ms.?) Crenelle. Youve not tried to understand Brown. Your lazy."

[February 2] Vivian de St. Vrain responds:  "Whether I'm lazy or not, Brown writes in an obscure code. Why should I have to try to crack the code?  Why can't she write in English? She's a Professor of English, for goodness sake. It's not my job to figure out what she's trying to say; it's her job to make it plain."

[February 2] Sean R. Fine writes: "It makes me wonder about the "imaginary" in which Laura Brown seems to thrive. Closed, cloistered, self-congratulatory."

[February 3] Thurman Valentino (SVDGA) writes: "I think that Vivian de St. Vrain is absolutely correct not to try to figure out what that sentence means. It's not a reader's responsibility. My opinion is that Laura Brown is smart enough to produce a complicated argument, but not smart enough to make complicated argument clear."

[February 3] Michael F. Bristol writes: "Or maybe, dear Viv, you're not smart enough to figure it all out."

[February 4] Vivian de St. Vrain replies: "OK, Bristol, if you're so smart why don't you just tell us exactly what "persistent repetition of irresistible succession" means."  

[February 4] J C Occhiogrosso suggests: "One thing regularly follows another?"

[February 7] Beulah Withee writes:  "The problem is not with just that one sentence. It's that whole paragraphs and pages are filled with such difficult sentences. After each of these, a reader has to pause and interpret before going on to the next one. It puts far too much burden on the reader." 

[February 9] Gabriel Cussen III writes: "I tried to read the book but I didn't get very far. Do visitors to this blog remember the criticism of academic articles and books: "What is new is not true and what is true is not new." This book is even worse, because what's true is utterly trivial."

[February 9] Bernhard Starr responds: "Gabriel Cussen, I agree with you.  There's no there there."

[February 13]. Herbert Lecovin (Cornell '61) writes: "The important question is what is going on in her classroom. Does she lecture in this dialect and does she expect her students to write as she does?

Cornell English Then and Now: 3B

I'm still trying to come to terms with Laura Brown's book, The Counterhuman Imaginary. I've wrestled the title to a draw, and now I'm going to take a crack at the Introduction. Is this task a good use of my limited time?

Let me quote a sentence that I take to be the very heart of the book and the heart of the problem. It's a doozy.

"Human story telling is found to provide a subtle scenario for affirming the other-than-human, based on an imputed commonality that replaces human priority with cross-species inclusivity that transcends the human." 

Laura Brown's prose reads as if it were first drafted in German and then rendered into English by Google Translate.  

It takes effort, but once you penetrate its peculiar idiom, it makes a kind of sense. For those of my readers who are still with me, let me try to parse this sentence. I suspect It may mean something like, "human beings project thoughts and feelings onto animals and objects."

"Human story telling" [that is, literature]

"is found to provide" [the passive "is found," should be deleted even though it functions as a compliment to the person (i.e. the author herself) to whom this insight has been revealed.]

"a subtle scenario" [I don't know exactly what the phrase "subtle scenario" means; nor do I think that anyone else does.] 

"based on an imputed commonality " [I understand "commonality" because I know that humans and animals share many features. I don't see the necessity for the word 'imputed"; imputed by whom? who other than humans can "impute."] 

"that replaces human priority" [i.e. there should be no preference for humans over animals and rocks, despite the paradox that humans and not animals can think about the equivalence.] 

"with cross-species inclusivity" ["inclusivity" is implicit in the previous rejection of "human priority." Wow, these abstract nouns do pile up (commonality, priority, inclusivity). Suggested simplification: "that includes other species"]

"that transcends the human.]. Transcends, in this final clause, smuggles into the argument a new idea, because "to transcend" means "to surpass." The claim now, as this snake of a sentence winds its weary way to conclusion, is that the meaning that humans attach to things is greater than the humans who do the attaching. At least I think that is what it may mean.]

So after completing this investigation, I think that the claim is that literature projects ideas onto animals and also things. And sometimes these projections illuminate and enhance both things and animals. 

I'm exhausted. I had planned to discuss the Introduction at greater length, but I've had enough. Instead of proceeding with the introduction, I'm going to try to understand the chapter on Robinson Crusoe (a novel that I first read as a boy and have read several times since, and which I feel that I understand). Stay tuned.

 

 

[January 31]  Petal Rivera writes:  "So it seems that Brown's book is not a novelty of ideas, but a novelty of language."

[January 31] Sean R. Fine writes: "I agree with Ms. Rivera. Simple ideas cast in pretentious language to make them seem important. This emperor of literary criticism has no clothes. None whatsoever,"

[February 1] Joel Salzberg writes: "Vivian, good job of unravelling that sentence even though I still don't quite understand it."

{February 1] Viola Pilbeam writes: "Vivian, you're too kind. Why don't you just  admit that this whole book is absurd American nonsense."

[February 4] Helena Hotchkiss-Jones replies: "This absurdity can't be blamed on the Americans. It's as much the fault of Deleuze, Adorno, etc."]

[February 4] Joel Salzberg replied: "Who is Deleuze Adorno?" 

[May 2]  Evelyn Efflandt writes: "Joel, you always were a couple of candles shy of a menorah."

[May 3] Vivian de St.Vrain replies: "Evelyn, you always were a nasty bigot."

Cornell English Then and Now -- 3A

I am absolutely buffaloed by Laura Brown's book, The Counterhuman Imaginary (Cornell UP, 2023).

The title is a puzzle. Why does the adjective come after the noun? And what does the word "counterhuman" mean?  (One hundred and forty-six pages to go and I'm already off balance. I'm worried that if I can't understand the title I'm going to have a heck of a difficult time with the content.)

I took a guess that the coinage "counterhuman" would signify something monstrous or terrifying, like a vampire, troll or ogre. But I was not even in the ballpark. "Counterhuman," I have now discovered, is a term of art in contemporary literary criticism that refers to everything that is not human: not only animals, natural phenomena such as storms and earthquakes, but also "things" or objects -- anything that is constructed or manufactured. Not "inhuman' -- just not human. (But why "counter" rather than "non" human?)

Moreover, the word "imaginary," which I have for a lifetime understood to be an adjective signifying what is not material but rather a product of the human mind, as for example, art and literature and dreams, has also undergone metamorphosis. According to wiki, the adjective-turned-noun "imaginary" "is the set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols common to a particular social group and the corresponding society through which people imagine their social whole.” That's a deal of territory, but I think I understand: "imaginary" is essentially a synonym for what I might, naively, have called "culture." (Might an alternative to The Counterhuman Imaginary be The Culture of Things? It's a more inviting title and much less pretentious.)

But now I'm stopped in my tracks. The "imaginary, it appears, is "the work of a particular social group." How in the world, then, do the "counterhuman," who are incapable of thought, possibly generate "a structure of ideas?" Pots and pans and volcanoes and marmosets don't have brains that think or speak, except when we humans attribute such traits to them. 

In a whimsical moment, Duke Senior, in As You Like It, proposed that there are "tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones." Am I to understand that this author takes seriously what Shakespeare regarded as an ironic jokey extravagance? Gosh, I hope not.

I think I now get the point: Laura Brown, the prestigious Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell University, intends to defend a paradox. She will explain to me how non-humans, things without an intelligence, can create a culture. I'd better pay close attention. Or perhaps the author means to advance the trivial but more sensible and less sensational idea that humans can attribute culture to animals and things.

Nevertheless, I must say what's on my mind -- what a deliberately off-putting title. It's clearly designed to repel the general reader, someone like myself, and to speak only to coterie fellow-travelers who might understand either or both of the words "counterhuman" and "imaginary." Not a large potential audience.

Do I have a chip on my shoulder as I turn from the title to the Introduction. Yes, I believe I do.

 

[January 25] Marianne Morrison, Ph.D. writes:  "Vivian, you should not go on with this. Your so prejudiced against this writer that you cant give her a fair hearing."

[January 25] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Marianne, I'm trying my best to be fair and honest."

[January 26] Petal Rivera writes: "Vivian, I think you're naive to suggest a less pretentious title. I hate to say it, but the point is not to avoid pretense, but to be pretentious. No modesty in this book."

[January 27] J C Occhiogrosso writes:  "Vivian, you're being deliberately obtuse. C'mon, it's not so difficult."

[February 4] Vivian de St. Vrain responds:  "Ok, J C, if it's so easy, why don't you suggest a better title."

[February 12] Winifred A. Walker writes: "Like it or not, this is typical academic jargon. If you want to read this book, you must master the idiom."]

Cornell English Then and Now -- 2

To begin my project of getting a fix on Cornell's Department of Literatures in English, I attempted to read Professor Jeremy Braddock's Collecting as Modernist Practice (Johns Hopkins, 2012). 

My plan is to read these Cornell contributions to knowledge with as much empathy and as little prejudice as I can muster.

Despite my good will, I got off to a bad start. The title of Braddock's book, Collecting as Modernist Practice, struck me as dispiriting and uninviting. It's an uncompromising coterie title that seems to say to me (and to every general reader), "I don't care whether you read this book or not." And indeed the copy that I borrowed from the university library had sat on the shelf unthumbed and pristine for the twelve years since its publication. Perhaps it's the minuscule typeface.

Collecting as Modernist Practice is not a page-turner. I found it rough going, and I now confess that I read closely only the introduction and one chapter -- and skimmed the rest.  Braddock studies the work of collecting and anthologizing art and poetry in the modernist (mostly 1920s) period. The chapter that I studied, The New Negro in the Field of Collections, was enlightening and I was glad to have read it. Braddock is an indefatigable researcher. Sentence after sentence is supported by extensive archival work and a plenty of footnotes. I do wish that the author was as interested in the art and mystery of literature as he is in literature's reception. Collecting as Modernist Practice might be more at home in a department of sociology. 

Braddock's prose style is awkward and forbidding. He loves long static sentences with complex subjects and predicates that are sutured with weak verbs. In the pages that I studied, I rarely encountered a metaphor or any other figure of speech. Braddock is also partial to newly-coined polysyllabic abstractions that he may think add heft to his thesis, but which in fact frustrate his readership: minoritarian, identitarianism, anthologization, narrativizing. On the whole, entirely too much suffixizationality.  

I will always be grateful to Braddock for introducing me to Witter Bynner's 1917 Spectra hoax, of which I was ignorant, and especially for acquainting me with the fabulous name of one of poets that Bynner invented: Anne Knish.

 

[January 13] Oksana Sartry writes:  "Vivian, I don't think that you're entirely fair to Braddock. It's true that his prose style is imperfect, but remember that the book is most likely his dissertation.  And for a diss. it's quite good. I also think that when he writes about poetry, he's quite thoughtful and insightful."

[January 13] Marianne Morrison, Ph. D. writes:  "Vivian, your too harsh about Braddock's vocabulary. Those words that you poke fun at are the regular vocabulary for people of his generation; your out of touch.  

[January 14] Oksana Sartry replies: "I wonder why Johns Hopkins published this diss. in its modernism series. Good diss., but immature book."

[January 17] Sean R. Fine writes:  "I'm interested in modernism, but frankly, this book is absolutely unreadable. Whatever value it has is buried beneath tons of jargon. Gives academia a bad name." 

 

Cornell English Then and Now -- 1

Here's a truth that blows my freakin' mind: since I earned my B. A. in English from Cornell University in 1960, sixty-five years have come and gone. Glaciers have melted and rivers have changed their course since, way back when, in a prior millennium, I was first introduced to serious literature -- to Chaucer and Milton and George Eliot.

My professors in those far-away-and-long-ago days were exclusively male and for the most part veterans of WW2 or the Korean war. They wrote definitive scholarly articles for the Philological Quarterly or for Modern Philology; they published learned monographs on canonical poets and novelists; and they taught courses with such forthright titles as The Seventeenth Century and Wordsworth and Coleridge. Although I was an indifferent student before I arrived at Cornell, I found an intellectual home in the Department of English. Inasmuch as I did not have a brain for rigorous science or for the tough analytic philosophy that was then in fashion, I was fortunate that the work of English suited my limited abilities -- curiosity, patience, a good memory, and something of a feel for language.

Just yesterday (and what, pray tell, prompted me?), I took a peek at the current website of Cornell's English Department. (In the index-card 1950s, when the manual typewriter was the acme of technology, the word "website" would have signified a dark corner colonized by spiders.) Even at first glance, the 2025 Cornell website said to me "very very different, very 'now'." While an occasional word or phrase was recognizable, it was the novelty -- the modernity, I guess -- that flared from the electronic page and dazzled mine eyne. Time marches on, no doubt, but whether it marches boldly forward or plunges over a cliff remains to be established.  

First of all, it's no longer the Department of English. It's now, hurrah!, the "Department of Literatures in English." What a welcome redefinition -- an assertion that English is a world language and that it houses a world literature. Nowadays, if I sit down with a work of fiction, I'm just as likely to read a novel by a writer from Africa or India or Australia as one from the British isles or North America. There's not a reason in the world why Chinua Achebe or Abdulrazak Gurnah should not be studied in an English Department. I respect this shift in focus and I regret that my 1950s Beowulf-to-T. S. Eliot English department was so parochial, so provincial. I can only admire the fact that the Department of Literatures in English has annexed to itself whole continents of writing -- a case of academic imperialism that this time seems wholly right and just.

The website also reveals that, in a nation in which the study of the humanities in higher education is at risk, Cornell's English is a huge thriving enterprise. There are fifty-one people on permanent staff, almost all of professorial rank. Of this number, twenty-seven -- or slightly more than half -- are women. And among those pictured on the site, a significant number are "of color." Undoubtedly, the present department is a far more representative collection of individuals than my 1950s faculty. Moreover, the chair, the associate chair, the director of undergraduate studies, the director of graduate students, and the director of writing are all women. It may once have been the case that the occasional female interloper was a token for display only, but not so now.

And what do these handsome and distinguished men and women study? Fortunately for me, members of the faculty list their areas of concentration. Most claim two or three specialties, some as many as five; a few recalcitrant individuals list none, leaving me to wonder whether they are polymaths or just ornery uncooperative academics. Among the fifty-one, the single expertise most commonly claimed is "cultural studies." This preponderance set me back a bit, because "cultural studies" is not a term I recognize nor one that existed, as far as I know, in the 1950s, when the word "culture" was synonymous with "civilization" -- sometimes just Western Civilization -- and when "cultured" meant something equivalent to "educated" and possibly even "socially established." But now, apparently, "cultural studies" is, and I quote a respected source, "an academic field  that... investigates how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power. These include ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender." Am I correct, and is it possible, for me to infer from this litany of nouns that "cultural practices" comprehends just about everything that we as a society say or do? Clearly the Department of Literatures in English lays claim to a heck of a lot of intellectual territory -- and that it is a far more aggressive entity than is revealed by its mere absorption of Anglophone novels. I was initially suspicious of these extensive claims, but after reflecting a while I recognized that, if I set to one side the self-aggrandizing listing of ideology, ethnicity, class... etc,), cultural studies may in practice simply bring to the forefront such elements as imperialism and nationhood in Robinson Crusoe or race and gender in Othello. Wouldn't it be comforting if "cultural studies" is at least in part merely traditional wine in spiffy new bottles? I, for one, certainly hope so.

After cultural studies, it is "literary theory" that claims the largest group of adherents -- thirteen, or about a quarter of the faculty. This revelation surprised me because I would have guessed that "theory" had long since gone the way of the aurochs and the mouflon. "Theory" had its herd of enthusiasts in its obscurantist heyday in the last century, yet it seems to be alive and kicking at Cornell -- but only, I suspect, as a vestigial remnant of an earlier time and only among the more senior members of the Department.

Following "theory" in popularity among the professoriate are the seven members who stake their claim to "gender studies." Six other say "African-American." The nine who announce a specialty in creative writing may not know that they are the successors and the beneficiaries of the late revered Professor James McConkey. Not a single member of the faculty offers "Shakespeare" or "Milton" as an area of expertise. I do not doubt that the study of gender and African-American and Asian-American literatures is a good thing, but I would have wished that the authors of the finest works of art in all of Anglophonia be accorded equivalent attention and status.   

Would a reincarnated Youthful Me elect take a degree from such a faculty?  I'm skeptical, but I can't say for sure because I don't know whether or not, in the classroom, the scrupulous examination of literature and ideas has been undermined by transitory and faddish ideologies. I must confess that the biases of the website make me feel old and wary and out of touch. And tired.

Well then, what does take place in the classroom?

Let's sample some evidence.

In days of yore, I enrolled in "Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama," a course taught by the distinguished scholar and teacher David Novarr. The course was organized as a chronological march from Kyd and Marlowe in the 1580s right through to Ford and Massinger -- the last playwrights of significance before the theaters went dark in 1642. I remember savoring some delightful comedies by Ben Jonson and Francis Beaumont and also a couple of ferociously brilliant tragedies by Thomas Middleton -- writings, I suspect, that 2020s English majors are not destined to encounter -- even though an acquaintance with these plays is essential background for understanding the timeless works of Shakespeare.  

There's no equivalent course in the present curriculum, but there is an analogue, and it appears in the catalogue of offerings thusly: 

ENGL 3240. Blood Politics:  Comparative Renaissance Drama

Blood is everywhere. From vampire shows to video games, our culture seems to be obsessed with it. The course examines the power of "blood" in the early modern period as a figure that continues to capture our imagination, not only as a marker of racial, religious, and sexual difference and desire, but also as a dramatic player in its own right. How does a politics of blood appear on stage when populations are being expelled and colonized for reasons (mis)understood in terms of blood?.... Topics include honor, revenge, purity, the body, sexuality, conversion, and death.

The course description itself is a mess -- both incomprehensible and meretricious. I'm shocked by the catchpenny pandering. Do 2020s teachers need to lure students into their classrooms with "vampires" and "videos?" The assertion that "blood is a dramatic player in its own right" is nonsense. The description reads like advertising copy for a cheesy low-budget horror flick playing at some louche all-night grind house.

Moreover, "blood" isn't "everywhere." Goodness gracious!

I'm afraid that these entrancing plays are doomed to be put through the "cultural studies" homogenizer. Or "theorized" out of all compass.

Ah, well.

Back in 1960, I had a summer job in Ithaca and therefore happened to be loafing around the campus when the University hosted its returning alumni. Among the returnees were the old folks  -- some few of them members of the class of 1895 -- who had walkered and wheel-chaired to their Sixty-Fifth. Geezers, I thought. It's sobering to realize that those codgers were the same age -- 86 -- as I am now. Should I  return to Ithaca this coming spring, for my very own Sixty-Fifth, I will be perceived by the young 'uns exactly as I observed those Class of 1895 guys: as ancient and irrelevant.

It follows, therefore, that my reservations about the 2025 English curriculum have their exact parallel in the 1895ers perspective on my 1960 curriculum. It's not hard to imagine that they -- I mean the members of the class of 1895 -- who had been educated in elocution and Old Norse, would have been shocked and perhaps outraged by the 1950s "modern" curriculum that I found so enticing and illuminating.

And now, because I don't want to go full curmudgeon and become the kind of superannuated guy who shakes his ebony stick at the modern world and deplores the decline of civilization, I'm going to make an effort to find out what's really going on in 2025. I have therefore set myself the task of reading a representative sample of the books written by members of the present-day English faculty.

I'll report on my studies right here.

Stay tuned.

[January 18] Bernhard Starr writes:  "Vivian, you are right about the course description. It's a disgrace. It's badly written and ridiculous. Why didn't you include the name of the prof. who wrote it?  He/she needs to be exposed. What "populations are being expelled and colonized" by Volpone or The Changeling?  And did you look other course descriptions -- are they equally silly?  What's worst about the course description is that it doesn't respect the plays that the class is going to examine. They're not important interesting dramas to the teacher -- they're just fodder for an ideology. 

[January 19] Vivian de St. Vrain replies: "Mr. Starr, I didn't identify the author of the course description because the website doesn't identify him/her. Just as well. Also, I didn't read other course descriptions though I might do so in the future. I think you're correct that the course description does not respect the dramas or their authors. Which is, as you suggest, mighty disappointing." 

[January 19] Bernhard Starr replies:  "I think I'd rather study Old Norse."

[February 4] Thurston Dale replies:  "I guess I'm a geezer, too (Cornell, '65). I'm glad I majored in English before criticism turned crazy. Great teachers -- Mizener, Abrams, Parrish, Novarr."

[March 17] Anatole Miles Webber writes: "Vivian, you were naive back in the 1950s and you're still naive now. You assume that the Cornell English Department of your youth, 65 years ago, was normative and normal. You were then and still are oblivious to the fact that the Department's 1950 curriculum was the product of stress and change and compromise. Try to remember that there were at least three forces at work and that various faculty members had various degrees of commitment to them. The first group was the oldest -- the traditionalist who studied, as they had always done, literature as history and biography and philology. Get the text and the context right was their primary concern. Then there were the 'new critics" -- heirs to Leavis and Scrutiny in England and the southern agrarians (Ransom, Tate, Warren) in the US. But the main intellectual current riling English Departments were the fierce critics out of New York (mostly Jewish) circles (Kazin, Trilling, Fiedler, Paul Goodman, Irving Howe, etc). In retrospect, even though Cornell brought both Lionel Trilling and Cleanth Brooks to Ithaca during your and my years there, the new winds made little impression on our education. Cornell was peaceful, isolated and non-ideological. It appears from your writing that you preferred it that way and still do. It was stable until the theory people brought in novelty and confusion and excitement.

[April 15] Parnell Pratt replies: "And also monumental pretension. And eventual collapse and failure."

[May 3] Lance Birdseye (Lt., USAF) writes: "What a funny website this is. Hey, folks, join the real world."

 

Books I Read, 2024

Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls; Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep; Felipe Alou, My Baseball Journey; Guy de la Bedoyere, Gladius, the World of the Roman Soldier; Gordon Dee Alcorn, Owls; Martin H. Levinson, Brooklyn Boomer; J.N. Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin Language; Sybille Haynes, Etruscan Civilization, a Cultural History; Philip Freeman, Julian, Rome's Last Pagan Emperor; G & L Bonfante, The Etruscan Language, An Introduction; Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories; Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons; Ellen Gilchrist, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams; Kim Chernin, In My Mother's House; Ines Augrain Thomas, Memoirs of an 84 Year Old; Louise Penny, The Cruelest Month; Abramovitch and Galvin, Jews of Brooklyn; Helen Czerski, The Blue Machine, How the Ocean Works; Ian Buruma, Spinoza, Freedom's Messiah; Robert Leighton, Tarquinia, an Etruscan City; Joseph B. Solodow, Latin Alive; William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, Barry S Brown, La Signora Watson e I Segreti di Parkington Manor; Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli; Patrick Joyce, Remembering peasants, a personal history of a vanished world; Charles Darwin, Origin of Species (parts); Sean Sayers, The Making of a Marxist Philosopher, Leo Tolstoi, Anna Karenina; David Gibbins, The History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks; Lisa Kaltenegger, Alien Earths; Nicholas Kristof, Chasing Hope; William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing; Abdulrazak Gurnah, Other Lives; Mollie Gillen, The Masseys; Hibl & Hibl, The Handel Lamps Book;  William Shakespeare, King Lear; Caroline Dodds Pennock, On Savage Shores; Andrew Lipman, Squanto, a Native Odyssey; Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd; Lee Siegel, Groucho Marx; Ben Goldfarb, Eager, the Surprising Secret Life of Beavers; Robert Louis Stevenson, The Lantern Bearers and other Essays; Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness; Margarette Lincoln, London and the 17th Century; Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending; Mark Kurlansky, The Basque History of the World.

My Life with Shakespeare - I

As a rule, I keep my distance from live performances of a Shakespeare play because I seldom enjoy the experience and regularly find it misleading. This has not always been the case. A few versions, notably the lucid Scofield Coriolanus at Stratford in 1962, are still vivid in my brain. What has happened?  Somewhere along the way, I've lost patience and lost interest in playgoing. Am I alone?  I remember sitting in some theater or other in the way back when, when, glancing left and right in my row, I could not help noting that a significant cadre of my fellow spectators were not engrossed in the performance but were nodding off, and that others in my vicinity were clearly bored, drifting passively toward sweet sleep.

This is a phenomenon that I had never encountered at a baseball game where everyone is alert and engaged. Anything but silent and sometimes raucous?

So why were all these numb Shakespeare spectators sitting as still as stones?

And why was I among them, inasmuch as I too, let me confess, was bored by the performance. I was not, as I yearned to be, lost in the words or engaged by the action. While I resisted sleep, except possibly for a second or two here and there, I was treading mental water, so to speak. Not exactly hypnotized, but certainly not transfixed. And I was in this state of inattention even though I knew the words that the actors were saying as well or better than they knew them themselves. Eventually, in the course of time, I came to admit to myself that to attend a Shakespeare play was not for pleasure but rather to honor an eminence, to pay dues to a cultural icon, to participate in a ritual of cultural hegemony -- and that I had paid good money in order to worship at the shrine of Shakespeare and to lend my support to what has long been labelled "Shakespeare idolatry."  This revelation, or apercu, or insight made me unhappy as I am not by nature given to reverence. To try to bend my will to admire on-stage oratory felt inauthentic, contrary to myself as I knew myself. 

Yet I am an unabashed, unapologetic lover of Shakespeare. Not of the theater, but of the book. When I sit myself down to read one of Shakespeare's most excellent plays, the experience can be and often is utterly transcendent. 

It is reading that unlocks the play; puts me in touch with true genius.There's something about the one-on-one concentration that you can give to a book in your very own hands in your very own chair that you can't give to a performance, where you're crammed into your space and have lost to your neighbor the battle for the arm rest. You're distracted by the inevitable snuffles and sneezes of your fellows and by the too-clever sets and costumes and lighting and artifice -- all of which interfere with your grasp of what is most important about poetic drama -- the words. But at home, I'm dazzled by the poetry and I am transported with aesthetic bliss (however defined). I'm moved to tears and laughter and also admiration.

He's endlessly fascinating, this Shakespeare guy, and intelligent, and a poet like none other. 

It's all I need; a comfortable posture for my ancient limbs, a bit of silence, a book --  and I'm in awe. 

Performances, in my opinion, erect a barrier to understanding and obscure rather than illuminate the plays. It's necessarily so, because directors and actors interpret the play.  It's their job;  it's what they do. Interpret. And every interpretation, no matter how skillful, is an obstacle.

A reader is less constrained and can keep his mind open. No one, no thing, to mediate between the eyes and the page.  

Performances are especially hazardous when directors deliberately attempt to make a play relevant or in accord, somehow, with the zeitgeist of the decade. Clever catchpenny novelties do nothing for me. Why must plays be set anywhere but where Shakespeare intended them?  Any effort to update a play, or make it "contemporary" or "feminist" or "anti-fascist" or "anti-colonial" or whatever, produces only distraction and distortion. Which is why the long history of Shakespeare on stage is a woeful history of addled misinterpretation. Nahum Tate's notorious King Lear of 1681, in which Edgar and Cordelia embrace at the end and Lear is pensioned off is ludicrous, but not more absurd than last year's Queen Lear.

Query: if I'm so disdainful of live performances, how is it that I'm so fond of Shakespeare on film.

But that's a subject for another day. 

Alou

I read Felipe Alou's autobiography, My Baseball Journey (2018). It's not a literary masterpiece, but nevertheless a solid book that "does the job." It's particularly valuable for its story of the brutalities faced by a black Dominican pioneer coming to segregated America in the early '50s. A good reminder of a part of our ugly racial history that is so easy to forget or ignore. In an afterword, Bruce Bochy calls Alou the "Jackie Robinson of South America." My Baseball Journey is also a good reminder of the daily hardships faced by the professional athlete. True enough that they're well paid, but also true that they're subject to injuries and decay and insecurity and have to fight for their job every day. There's no such thing as tenure in sports. Alou was smart and resilient and proud and enjoyed a career that can be justly celebrated -- but not all do. 

Here's my favorite paragraph: "I missed playing when I retired. Every retired ballplayer goes through the same things, the same thoughts and emotions. I still miss playing. To this day, I have dreams that I'm still playing. Sometimes I have nightmares where I"m late for a game or I've missed a team bus to the ballpark." I understand this sentiment very well; like many of my peers, I still dream that I'm either late for class or am standing in front of a large audience and have absolutely no knowledge of the subject about which I'm required to discourse for an hour. 

One weakness of My Baseball Journey: though Alou managed through the steroid years, and knew Barry Bonds and others, he gives the drug problem mighty short shrift. His book turns a blind eye toward that painful period.  

Books I Read, 2023

Ian McEwan, Black Dogs; Ian McEwan, Saturday; Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time; Ian McEwan, Amsterdam; Marcia Davenport, East Side, West Side; Thomas Halliday, Otherlands; Joseph Sassoon, The Sassoons; Jane Austen, Persuasion; Jane Austen, Mansfield Park; Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles; Jonathan Raban, Bad Land; David Thomson, Sleeping with Strangers; Michael North, The Baltic; Niall Williams, This is Happiness; James Vincent, Beyond Measure; Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove; Andrea Wulf,The Invention of Nature; Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield; David Hone, How Fast Did T. Rex Run?; Richard Klein, Cigarettes are Sublime; Claire Keegan, Foster; Howard Koch, Casablanca: Screenplay and Legend; Jeremy Dauber, Jewish Comedy, a Serious History; Caroline Pennock, On Savage Shore; The Best of Sholom Aleichem, ed. Howe and Wisse; Richard S. Laub, Two Acres of Time; Susan Rubin Suleiman, Daughter of History;  Rachel Brownstein, American Born; Mabee Weinstein, Ferns; Jane Austen, Emma (2x); Margo Jefferson, Negroland; Marsha Gordon, Becoming the Ex-Wife; Judith Hicks Stiehm, Janet Reno, A Life; Elliot Willensky, When Brooklyn was the World; Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life; Roger Cohen, The Girl from Human Street; Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place; James Sturm, The Golem's Mighty Swing; Ian Smith, Black Shakespeare; Robert A.M. Stern, Between Memory and Invention; Paul G. Bahn, Cambridge Illustrated History of Prehistoric Art; George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia; Barry Manilow, Sweet Life; Jonathan Balcombe, Super Fly;  Eric R. Kandel, There is Life after the Nobel Prize; Barry Menikoff, Stone Mother; Norman Podhoretz, Making It;  David Scheel, Many Things Under a Rock; Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; Eric Kandel, In Search of Memory; Timothy Garton Ash, Homelands.

Another Brooklyn Memoirist: Barry Manilow

The singer and composer Barry Manilow writes that he took three arduous years to produce his rather thin memoir (Sweet Life, Adventures on the Way to Paradise, 1987). I'm skeptical of his claim because his book has all the outward indications of the celebrity genre that might justly be called the "as-told-to's. It's written as a flow of "I did this, then I did that; I was great."  The dullest prose; I don't think there's so much as a metaphor in the entire book.  Gosh, I searched high and low for genuine feeling, for insight or learning, or for complexity of vision. No dice. How could such an unreflective, shallow being have achieved so much?  Been so popular, so highly regarded, so famous.

I can't say that I'm very familiar with Manilow's music, but I'm pleased to learn that he produced Bette Midler's debut album, The Divine Miss M. "Delta Dawn" and "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" were midlife favorites that I've been pleased to revisit today (with the assistance of officious Alexa).

Brooklyn influence? Manilow seems to be a bit ashamed of his origins. At age 20, he moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan. "As we drove away, I said to myself, 'Good-bye, Brooklyn. Thanks for everything. I'm never coming back.' And I never did."  The only clear evidence of his Brooklynity is that he named his beloved dog "Bagel."

Another Brooklyn Memoirist: Pete Hamill

Half of Pete Hamill's memoir sometimes seems to have dropped down from another universe or more precisely from an alternative civilization, while the other half depicts events and ideas that are as familiar to me (as they say) as the back of my hand. Although Pete and I are both Brooklynites and near-contemporaries (he was born in 1935, and I in 1939), our lives were o so similar and yet completely different. But that's the way things were in complex, composite 1940s Brooklyn.

The title of Hamill's memoir establishes the differences. It's well-named -- A Drinking Life (1994) -- and it is saturated with liquor and Irish bars and elbow-lifting and most especially with Pete's father's uncontrollable and disabling alcoholism. Yet just a few blocks over, in my part of Brooklyn, alcohol played no part whatsoever in my own family or my life in the neighborhood. I would not call an autobiography of my own An Abstinent Life, because we weren't teetotalers and there was always a glass of Scotch to offer to guests, but we hardly ever touched the stuff ourselves. It wasn't until much later in life that I came to realize that my father and I were genetically incapable of digesting alcohol. I've written about this peculiar phenomenon here.  

Equally in contrast was Hamill's early education. The poor fellow was enrolled at Holy Name of Jesus, a Catholic parochial school where one of his teachers was the "snarling vicious Brother Jan, a thick-necked Pole with a jutting jaw and bent nose" -- your classic sadist -- who derived his joy in life by whipping with a thick ruler the bare hands and butts of defenseless boys. I myself learned to read and cipher at P.S. 217, a public elementary. At 217, we had teachers both gifted and incompetent but no deranged monsters and no corporal punishment. I can remember being bored at school, but not terrified. Not terrified of the teachers, that is -- among the students we had our fair share of bullies and sociopaths.

Hamill's Park Slope family took Roman Catholicism seriously but he himself was not an enthusiast. Although he loved the costumes and the incense and the majestic hymns, and although he confesses that the loved the "cartoony name" of the Holy Ghost, he was, right from the start, an instinctive atheist. My Flatbush family proffered us nary a single drop of religious information or indoctrination or training. I myself had never attended a single religious service in either synagogue, church, temple, mosque or tabernacle until 2021, and then only because it was New Orleans and we heard that Ellis Marsalis had volunteered to improvise a few measures on the piano. Hamill was a atheist by dissent; I was one by inheritance. 

Nevertheless, Hamill and I shared a great deal -- mostly, I think, in the form of popular culture. Ring-o-levio, spaldeens, stoop ball. Where else but in Brooklyn was a "do-over" a "hindoo?" And baseball. Hamill remembers that an uncle confided to him that "the Dodgers are the greatest thing in the world." He delights in reciting a litany of familiar Dodger names: "Augie Galan, Dixie Walker, Ralph Branca, Joe Hatten, Henk Behrman, Hugh Casey." Except to a select few of us, these names are meaningless random syllables, but to those who were children at a particular time and place, they are poetry in its purest and most sublime form, each name a luscious mouthful of pure pleasure. Syllables that will forever bond Hamill and me to the end of the chapter. Syllables that transcend this transitory sublunary existence.

Like me, Hamill was a great lover and collector of comic books. Both of us savored heroes such as Captain Marvel and Captain Marvel jr. and the Human Torch and the Green Lantern and Plastic Man and the Sub-Mariner and Wonder Woman and Invisible Scarlet O'Neill. Hard to believe but there are those who think that Freddie Freeman is only an all-star first baseman, but Hamill and I know better.

And also like me, Hamill found his way the public library where he measured himself against Jim Hawkins and Edmond Dantes and Sydney Carton and D'Artagnan. Tough competition. 

Sometimes, Pete Hamill leaves pop culture behind and delves into his own personal psychology. Here's a paragraph of unusual sincerity and one that touches at least tangentially on my own experience. It appears in a discussion of the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson. (I should mention that I read everything of Stevenson's that the McDonald Avenue Library possessed.)

 "I sensed (says Hamill) that I was my own version of Jekyll and Hyde. In my head, the Good Boy was constantly warring with the Bad Guy. I wanted to be the Bad Guy, tough, physical, a prince of the streets, at the same time I was driven to be the Good Boy: hardworking, loyal, honorable, an earner of money for the family. The Bad Guy cursed, growled, repeated dirty jokes and resisted Brother Jan, the Good Boy served Mass in the mornings and read novels in bed at night."

In retrospect, I realize that I shared  a bit of Hamill's doppelgangerism. In real life, I was a conforming Jekyll; but in my heart, in my soul, I was a fierce dissenter. Lots of anger, lots of unfocussed passion. I didn't much act upon my Hydeness, except for the occasional adolescent pilfering and the meaningless fights. But how else to account for the violent dreams -- especially the regularly-repeated nightmares where I bashed in the heads of unidentifiable adults with a heavy shovel?  And buried their bodies in my father's backyard garden underneath the hybrid teas? 

Jane Austen's Emma; Harriet Smith's Ancestry

Both partisans and skeptics of Jane Austen's Emma will remember Harriet Smith, the young woman who becomes the object of Emma Woodhouse's officious matchmaking. Harriet's ancestry is explained by JA; she is "the natural daughter of someone" -- that is, she is an illegitimate child of obscure origin. Harriet's patronizing friend Emma imagines, without a shred of evidence, that the poor dear must be the daughter of nobility. She therefore interferes with Harriet's romantic prospects, first by discouraging an "attachment" to an upright and capable farmer -- and then by promoting relationships which we readers are taught to believe should be beyond Harriet's aspiration. JA, for all her satirical spirit, is not one to challenge the rigid class distinctions of rural Highbury. 

But then, at the very end of the novel, other options having led to disaster, Harriet and farmer Robert Martin are allowed to marry.  Almost as a coda -- an afterthought -- Austen reveals to us that 

Harriet''s parentage became known. She proved to be the daughter of a tradesman, rich enough to afford her the comfortable maintenance which had ever been her's and decent enough to have always wished for concealment, -- such was the blood of gentility which Emma had formerly been so ready to vouch -- It was likely to be as untainted, perhaps, as the blood of many a gentleman, but what a connexion had she been preparing for Mr. Knightley -- the Churchills -- or even for Mr. Elton! The stain of illegitimacy, unbleached by nobility or wealth, would have been a stain indeed. 

It's a curious and I think distressing revelation.

There's an unpleasant sneer in the dismissive phrase, "daughter of a tradesman" where "merchant" or even "prosperous merchant" might have been more generous. Moreover, the pregnant phrase "illegitimacy unbleached by nobility or wealth" neatly encapsulates the hypocrisy of a society that can condone a rich bastard but condemn a poor one. 

But what is most bothersome about the paragraph is what it omits. Although JA pull back the curtain on Harriet Smith's father, she does not bother herself to reveal anything about Harriet Smith's mother. Surely even an illegitimate child had one, and surely that mother, in addition to her pregnancy and childbirth, had a story of her own -- both before and after she surrendered her child. If Harriet's father can be revealed (even though he is not named), why then, why not her mother?  What is implied by this omission? That the mother doesn't matter -- she was merely "someone's" mistress or concubine. Or perhaps a prostitute. That Harriet's status in society has nothing to do with her inconsequential mother.

Or perhaps that JA, raveling the loose ends of her story, preferred to avoid a distracting complication.  

My own theory is that JA just simply forgot. Because fathers matter a great deal and mothers matter much less, it's not of any moment who was Harriet's mother. In psychological terms, JA is guilty of a perfect parapraxis -- and unconscious forgetting, canceling, or, in modern jargon, an erasing. Harriet's mother is not even erased -- she's utterly non-existent.

Sometimes what is not represented can be as revealing as what is included.

Our Classmate Janet Reno

My first visit in four months to the new acquisitions shelf of the Boulder Public Library turned out to be fruitful, for I discovered J. H. Stiehm's 2023 biography of Janet Reno: Janet Reno, A Life (Gainesville, Fl). Janet was a classmate ('60) at Cornell and also proceeded with me to Harvard, where she was one of 16 women in her law school class, and I was a undistinguished graduate student in GSAS. I knew her slightly at Cornell; she "sat desk" at Sage Hall, where I was a frequent caller. Our relationship never advanced beyond superficial chat and I was surprised as all get out when she re-emerged in 1993, having been appointed Attorney-General by President Clinton. She served in that position for eight years and made quite a mark. 

I've been on a project of reading the memoirs of members of my age-cohort, especially of those with whom I've crossed paths, even if ever so slightly.  I think that so far, Janet Reno is the only one of my acquaintances who's earned not just an autobiography, but a biography of her own.

I was particularly interested in the paragraphs about Janet's Cornell and Harvard years, but I'm sorry to report that those sections are notably thin and superficial. Stiehm's account make Cornell seem archaic and primitive -- out of a 1930s movie. It is news to me that "freshman wore beanies, sophomores had Cornell sweaters, juniors had blazers, and seniors had straw hats." Mere mythology. It's true, though, that there was considerable drinking at fraternity and apartment parties, but for what college was that not true?

Careless errors: Janet did not live at Dickinson Hall, she lived at Clara Dickson Hall. She did not study political theory with non-existent Professor Mario Anatti, but no doubt she did take classes with the distinguished scholar-politician Mario Einaudi.

Stiehm passes over in silence the most egregious moment in Janet's career -- when she was suckered into allowing villainous Ken Starr to expand his probe into Bill Clinton's sexual adventures. Either an apology or an explanation should surely have been in order.

Roux/ Rue/ Rue/ Rubaboo

"Roux" is word that everyone seems to know but me. To the best of my recollection, "roux" had never crossed my personal threshold until last week -- perhaps because I have never taken any special interest in fine cuisine. I've now enlightened myself, but at the cost of blundering into a bewildering etymological thicket.

"Roux," to reprise the obvious, is "a mixture of flour and fat cooked together and used to thicken sauces.... Butter or lard are commonly used fats." But why "roux," with its excrescent French x? Un nom étrange. Roux, if I have it right, means brown, or more precisely, reddish brown (as opposed to "brun" or "marron." In the case of the sauce, roux is an abbreviated version of "beurre roux," or brown butter and, curiously, comes unbuttered into English as simply "roux." Roux derives from Latin russus or ruber, reddish, both of which ancient words originate in the same Indo-European root. I've now learned of a kind of surgery called a Roux-en-Y, probably pronounced "ruin why," which is a kind of "anastomosis"--  or gastric bypass -- in which blood or intestinal vessels are configured into a Y shape. But although one may suspect so, this "roux" has nothing to do with sauces, thank goodness, but is named for the Swiss  physician who originated the surgery, César Roux. I suspect that Roux's roux does not descend from ruber but from rufus, red-headed, as in William II, aka William Rufus.

But then there's the English word "rue." I know it as the common wildflower that we allow to grow in our waterfall garden, and there exist cultivated versions as well. This rue comes to English through French and from Latin ruta. The other English rue, as in "rue the day" is, as one might expect, of entirely different origin deriving from Old English hreow  -- "grief, repentance, sorrow, regret, penitence."

 

Exactly like Vivian de St Vrain, William Shakespeare was not familiar with "roux" but he knew and used both rues. Perdita offers the flowery one to Camillo and Polixenes: "Reverend sirs,/For you there's rosemary and rue; these keep/ Seeming and savor all the winter long." Ophelia, in her madness, also distributes rue, known also as herb of grace: "There's fennel for you, and columbines. There's rue for you, and here's some for me. We may call it herb of grace o' Sundays. O, you must wear your rue with a difference." The botanical rue is referenced by the poetical gardener in Richard II; "in this place/I'll set a bank of rue, sour herb of grace:/ Rue, even for ruth, here shortly shall be seen,/ In the remembrance of a weeping queen." The pun on rue/ruth is etymologically interesting. Ruth means sorrow and it is possible that ruth is to rue as truth is to true; that is to say, formed by analogy. 

 

It would be wrong to leave the subject of roux/rue without a mention of rubaboo, "an American stew or porridge of French and Métis people, consisting of bear grease along with peas, corn and other vegetables." Rubaboo blends "roux" with the Algonquian word aboo, which, I have been reliably informed, means soup and is therefore  an unusual, perhaps even unique IE + Algonquian formation. 

What We Read in the Fifties: East Side, West Side, by Marcia Davenport

Two weeks ago, I wrote some admiring remarks  about a little-known post-WWII film called East Side, West Side. I said then that I was sufficiently impressed and intrigued by the film that I intended to read the novel upon which it is based, but that since ES,WS has evaporated into the mists of time, I would have to wait for Interlibrary Loan to dig up a copy for me. Well, the novel has arrived, coming haste-post-haste from Laramie, Wyoming, the flyleaf inscribed, "To Mrs Eccleston, from Anna." Gosh, I'd love to know who Mrs. E and Anna were, and what they (and Laramie) made of this extremely Manhattan-y book. 

East Side, West Side (published in 1947), I can now report, is a big hunking doorstop of a novel. Not a very good one, I'm afraid. It is prosy, untidy, and crammed with too many episodes and too many undifferentiated characters. To transform its meanderings into an economical screenplay required great intelligence and imagination. All praise to the screenwriter, Brooklyn's own Isobel Lennart, who condensed characters, eliminated subplots, rationalized excesses, and to some degree toned down the book's inherent snobbery. 

ES,WS can be described as an old-fashioned "woman's novel," and not in a good way. Its female characters are, almost uniformly passive victims. Plus there's far too much chat about makeup, dinner parties, and "fittings." There's an old --very old-- canard that an erotic novel for women consists of 400 pages of courtship and foreplay  followed by a proposal of marriage. I'm afraid that ES,WS fits this unfortunate formula. Jessie Bourne, wronged and soon-to-be-divorced wife, is wooed by gentlemanly General Mark Dwyer but o so slowly. Sex is teased and deferred for chapter after chapter. In Isobel Lennart's alert and improved script, women are not afraid to take charge. 

There's one episode in the novel that seriously rankled me. There's a murder. The privileged East Side aristocrats do not turn the guilty party over to the police; instead, they suppress evidence and suborn perjury in order to keep the scandal out of the newspapers. They succeed, though their plot couldn't have deceived the dullest precinct flatfoot. In the film, I'm glad to say, a killer is brought to justice.   

Toward the end of the novel, Marcia Davenport introduces a long embarrassing digression in which the General, just returned from the European theater, lectures on the post war situation in Eastern Europe. I'm sorry to say that he praises Soviet aggression in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, etc. I suspect that these tortured apologetics were written before Davenport lived in Prague and was engaged to marry the Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk, who in 1948 was thrown out of a window by agents of the KGB.  I hope that Davenport would have changed her position after the defenestration.

Books I Read, 2022

This year's list is incomplete. During the Vermont summer, I neglected to keep good records. My porous brain can't bring to mind all I read in June, July, August, and September. In addition, it's a list of books only, so no periodicals (New Yorker, New York Review of Books), Northern Forests) or newspapers.

Abdulrazak Gurnah, The Last Gift; Daniel Fuchs, Williamsburg Summer; L. J. Davis; A Meaningful Life;  Marc David Baer, The Ottomans, Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn; J.M. Quigley, Lolita in the Afterlife; Daniel Fuchs, Homage to Blenholt; A J Rich, The Hand that Feeds You;  Alfred Kazin, Walker in the City; Jonathan Lethem, Fortress of Solitude; Colm Toibin, Brooklyn; Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies;  Emily Gould, Friendship; James Agee, Brooklyn Is; Jenny Offill, Department of Speculation; Ursula Parrott, Ex-Wife; Kyle Harper, Plagues Upon the Earth; Adelle Waldman, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.; James McBride, The Color of Water; Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach; R. D. Rosen, Tough Luck; David Crystal, The Story of English; Seth Lerer, Inventing English; Paul Auster, Sunset Park; Richard Fortey, Fossils; Jay Neugeboren, Big Man; Magocsi and Petrovsky-Shtern, Jews and Ukrainians; Henry James, Portrait of a Lady; Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, The Golden Age Shtetl; Jay Neugeboren, Imagining Robert; James Huneker, The New Cosmopolis; Roland Ennos, The Age of Wood; Emily Bingham, My Old Kentucky Home; Marie Favereau, The Horde; John Dunn, The Glitter in the Green; Mike Unwin, Around the World in 80 Birds; Douglas Boyd, Plagues and Pandemics; David Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind; Riley Black, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs; William Shakespeare, The Second Part of King Henry the IV; Pekka Hamaleinen, Comanche Empire; Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood; Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending; William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair; An Italian Impressionist in France, Giuseppe De Nittis; Richard Powell, The Philadelphians; Pekka Hamaleinen, Indigenous Continent; David Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel and Language; Julian Barnes, Elizabeth Finch; Jeffrey Lovich, Turtles of the World; Andy Borowitz, Profiles in Ignorance; Tim Birkhead, Birds and Us; Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time; David Schiffman, Why Sharks Matter.

What We Read in the 1950s: The Philadelphian (1956)

Richard Powell's novel The Philadelphian has not worn well. It was a best-seller in 1956 and was made into a "blockbuster" film, starring Paul Newman, in 1959. We watched the movie (called, for some reason, The Young Philadelphians) on TCM and I was sufficiently intrigued that I ordered up the long-forgotten novel through our blessedly-efficient Interlibrary Loan. Gosh, what a disappointment! The Philadelphian is a pot-boiler, I'm afraid, very mid-century. It's got it all -- three-generations of rags to riches, heroic army service, blighted romance and cheesy sex, and a contrived climactic courtroom showdown. Powell's prose is flat, unstylish, at its best "journalistic," but marred by flights of tough-guy pseudo-Hammettian or Chandleresque prose: "He came slowly downstairs from the bedroom, with the pulse of blood hammering inside his skull like a rivet gun"; "Her head felt like a boiling tea kettle, and her thoughts kept escaping from it like steam"; "The applause had been a cheer for the underdog. Later it had developed that a wolf was romping around in underdog's clothing". Frankly, I'm surprised that the novel achieved such popularity in the years of my youth. Sorry to say but it's a trashy piece of writing.

The film is a bit better; more honest and more disciplined, hugely reliant on Paul Newman's youthful charisma.

Insightful Comment

Before I forget, I would like to put on the record the most memorable student sentence that I received during my entire 50+ years of teaching literature:  "After Gregor Samsa was transformed into a large insect, his lifestyle changed."

Henry James, Portrait of a Lady (1963-2022)

I read James' Portrait of a Lady in 1963 but never again until last week, so there has been a hiatus of almost three score years. During the interim, glaciers have melted, continents have subducted and conventional notions about what constitutes a "lady" have shifted quite marvelously. 

After such an interval, it's not disgraceful for me to confess that I remembered very little of the novel and that even major plot points came as a shock and surprise. Moreover, I re-read the novel with a bit of prejudice, because I had recently learned that Theodore Roosevelt once met James and dismissed him as "a miserable little snob." Even if I hadn't been alerted by Roosevelt's back-of-the-hand slap, I would have recognized that Portrait of a Lady generates enough snobbery to power a nineteenth-century locomotive from Rome to Florence even while hauling the book's entire cast of frequent travelers. It's a class-ridden novel in which lesser sophisticates are out-snobbed by superior sophisticates. Despite this unfortunate failing, Portrait of a Lady is a rather wonderful piece of writing.

Let me further confess that I brought a second and more deeply-rooted prejudice to my re-reading. In the early 1960s, when I was a graduate student of "English and American Language and Literature" at a New England university, Henry James was at the apex of his critical reputation. He was "the Master." In fact, an appreciation (or devotion) to James became a sort of ticket of admission to the coterie of the literary elite. A touchstone. If you (that is, me) were able to appreciate and adore James's extraordinarily subtle judgements and discriminations and his sustained and intricate analyses of the velleities of social interactions, why then, you were one of the elect. But if you were baffled by his niceties and sometimes could not divine what the heck he was going on and on about, why then you weren't what James calls in Portrait "a person of sensibility." And if you weren't a person of sensibility, why in tarnation were you studying literary history at a university that had been home to establishment sophisticates since 1636?

Not a James devotee, I managed to slip through the system without the disgraceful lacunae in my preparation coming to anyone's attention. And until this past week, I managed to keep my distance from Mr. Henry James. 

But I may have made a mistake to have done so. I'd still say that Portrait of a Lady isn't up there in the stratosphere with Bleak House and Middlemarch, but it's still a darn good novel. It's not conventionally exciting; in fact, it's talky and static in the extreme. Nothing much happens. Isabel Archer talks with Henrietta and HJ analyses the conversation. Then someone goes to Gardencourt and has a long conversation with Lord Warburton. Then Lord W meets Countess C in Rome and they talk. Then Madame Merle, who, we are told, was born in Brooklyn and therefore ought to have known better, has a long conversation with Isabel Archer. Then someone meets someone else in a museum or a train station or a restaurant and they have a long conversation -- once again dissected by HJ. Then they ride the rails to Florence and talk. Meanwhile Ralph Touchett is slowly dying and will continue die (and talk) for another five hundred pages. These various conversations are often oblique, with the most important points omitted or merely implied (to be grasped only by persons of subtlety and sensibility). It's all so slow that I sometimes felt myself yearning for a good solid knife fight or at least a lengthy car chase. When Isabel finally tells enigmatic villainess Madame Merle that she doesn't want to see her ever again, I longed for her to spit it out with a a good round "fuck off" -- but no such luck.

And yet as mysteries are revealed in the last third of the novel, Portrait becomes undeniably exciting. Much is familiar; it seems as though James recapitulates the marriage of Dorothea Brooke and Eddie Casaubon in the misalliance of Isabel Archer and the "sterile dilettante" Gilbert Osmond. And also borrows the Pansy plot from the story of Honoria Dedlock. But I came to these insights, if they are insights, only in retrospect; while reading the novel, I was surprised and intrigued.

I strongly object to the ending of the novel, which seemed to violate the trajectory of the plot. Surely Isabel has earned her freedom. To me, her continued bondage to propriety seems cruel to both the character and also to hopeful (but deceived) readers. Wicked, in fact, to the point of sadism. No doubt the conclusion tests a reader's sophistication, and no doubt if I read the voluminous commentary that the novel has engendered, the apparent cruelty of the conclusion would be be explained and justified. But I won't read the commentary. I'm obviously not a "person of sensibility" and I prefer to remain unimproved, unenlightened, and pissed.

Ex-Wife (1928); Divorcee (1930)

Through the continuing miracle of TCM, we watched Divorcee, a 1930 "pre-Code" drama of marriage and adultery. It's a film that was shocking in its own time and still carries a bit of an edge. Jerry Martin (Norma Shearer) and Ted Martin (Chester Morris) attempt to create a marriage of perfect equals, but Ted strays. There's a great understated scene in which Jerry, the betrayed wife, cold-bloodedly tells her unfaithful husband, that "I've balanced our accounts." Ted, though he has proclaimed a commitment to equality, does not, let us say, handle the revelation of his wife's adultery with grace. The marriage comes to a disastrous end. But alas after an hour or so of travail and weeping, Jerry loses her nerve, succumbs to propriety, pursues her erring husband to Paris, and promises to be true. The assertion of equity has turned out to be just so much blather. The double standard has been tested but has held firm. The film flirts with radicalism but reverts to a Hollywood ending in which love conquers all and an adventurous woman accepts her subordinate place.

I was sufficiently intrigued by the film to investigate its background. The source is a novel called Ex-Wife (1928) by Ursula Parrott, which sold 100,000 copies and was a sensation in its day. I confess that although I'm supposed to know something about literature, I had never heard of this scandalous piece of fiction. Ex-Wife sunk like a stone and has been out of print for many years, but our interlibrary loan department managed to locate a 80s reprint in Fort Lewis, Colorado. (Thanks, Interlibrary Loan!).

Ex-Wife is an inartistic piece of writing -- hectic, repetitive, padded, but one that obviously struck a nerve. In this novel, a young divorced woman does not just pine for her wandering husband. Instead, she enjoys her independence, and "sleeps with more men than [I] can count." She then she falls deeply in love with the wrong man, and finally opportunistically marries a third fellow whom she doesn't love but to whom she promises to be faithful (we are skeptical). The novel is marinated in speakeasy bootleg liquor and easy morality. Much wilder than the rather tame film version, it is also more challenging and revolutionary.

In the course of the novel, our heroine has a baby (who conveniently dies) and also an abortion. The babies are important to the larger backstory. In 1922, the then Katherine Ursula Towle, a recent Radcliffe graduate, married Lindesay Marc Parrott, a young reporter for The New York Times. 

They had a son named Lindesay Marc Parrott Jr. two years later. However, his existence was kept a secret from Ursula's husband, as he never wanted to have a son. So, Ursula left the child in the custody of her father and sister and returned to Lindesay, still not speaking a word about the son. It was not until 1926 that Lindesay found out that he was a father. As a result, he immediately divorced Ursula, rejected the existence of his son, and never once went to see him.

It's an astonishing revelation that certainly does not speak well for Lindesay Parrott, but adds some autobiographical interest to the plot of Ursula Parrott's Ex-Wife. Suddenly, the deceased child and the abortion make a certain kind of sense.

I should add that Lindesay Parrott was a name well known to me in the days of my youth. I was then a diligent reader of The New York Times and Lindesay Parrott covered the Korean War, so I encountered his name every single day from 1949 to 1955. And then in the 70s, I learned that Lindesay Parrott had retired from the Times and had purchased a small farm on Kidder Road in Bradford, Vermont, a bit more than a mile, as the crow flies, from where we lived on Hackett Hill Road. I gave thought to knocking on his door, but I heard through the local gossip chain that Parrott was a recluse and a terrible alcoholic. Whether true or not I don't know. Of course I had no idea that Lindesay Parrott had once been married to a notorious novelist.

As for Ursula, after her divorce from Lindesay Parrott, she married three more times, and was also rumored to have had affairs with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis. She died in 1957 "in the charity ward of a New York City hospital."

Here's Ursula Parrott's Radcliffe graduation picture: 

 

Here's a lurid paperback book cover:

 

 

And here she is in maturity:

 

 

[September 24, 2023]  I've just read a remarkable biography of Ursula Parrott, called Becoming the Ex-Wife, by Marsha Gordon, a professor of film studies.  It's a deeply researched piece of writing, and a revelation. Ursula Parrott's life was both more tied to convention and more lurid than it was represented in the Wik article from which I drew my information. The story about Lindesay Parrott not knowing about his son's birth nowhere appears on the biography. It's a myth, though it is true that Parrott was not much interested in his offspring (but in a indifferent-father rather than an ignorant-father way). Can't always trust Wikipedia.

 

How Ursula Parrott managed to burn through the huge sums that she garnered from her writing is mysterious to me, but it is unquestionable that she was a tragic homeless pauper at the end. Although Professor Gordon seems to have read everything Parrott wrote (and she composed acres of novels and stories), she did not entice me to read further in Parrott's work -- even if I could locate these long-out-of-print performances.

 

Gordon does not interest herself in the later career of Ursula's first husband so my anecdote about Lindesay Parrott's last years might yet be accurate.  

Novels Set in Brooklyn: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

My new reading project: novels set in Brooklyn. There are, I've already discovered, tons of them. I wonder how long I will last at this endeavor. Will it be a sterile or a fruitful exercise?

How is it that I never read, until this very week, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn?  It's certainly the best known novel with the noun "Brooklyn" in its title. I've known about it all my life and just never got around to looking at a single page. Did my parents, always tentative about sex, warn me off because the novel has a few frank passages. Or was it anti-Brooklyn snobbery?  As a young person, I wanted to read about far off places -- Pitcairn Island, nomadic central Asia, and the Africa of Rider Haggard, -- certainly not familiar grimy Brooklyn. At the McDonald Avenue branch of the public library, there were many well-worn copies of of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn sitting on the shelf -- which I ignored and, if I remember correctly, disdained.  

What did I miss?  Tree is not much in the way of a fiction. There's nothing like a plot, only a series of loosely-related episodes, and except for the central figure, not much character development. It's a barely-disguised autobiography. Francie Nolan, tracked from birth through her escape to, believe it or not, Michigan!!, comes from a grindingly poor family ("food insecure" before the term was invented). Much of the first few hundred pages is the barebones account of the struggle for sustenance (and lodging). There is so much emphasis on overcoming lack that Tree almost seems to fetishize or celebrate poverty. 

So much scrabbling for the next meal is hard to bear, painful to read. It's especially painful for me, because Betty Smith, born in 1896 in Williamsburg, preceded my father, also a native of Williamsburg (born in 1904) by only a few years. He came from an immigrant family as poor as poor can be, and some of the stories that he told me about the impoverishment of his youth echo and sometimes exceed Smith's. The essence, therefore, of this "novel," is familiar to me, perhaps entirely too familiar.

One blot upon the novel is its casual bigotry. Irish characters sometimes go to "Jewtown" for clothes or food. Jewish characters are gross stereotypes. But what can be expected from a popular novel of the 1940s, when the radio offered us, day after day,  large doses of Amos and Andy, Life with Luigi, The Goldbergs. How we guffawed at ethnic "humor" in those unenlightened days!  

Nor was I happy about the novel's Brooklyn chauvinism. For example: 

""There's no other place like it," Francie said.

"Like what?"

"Brooklyn. It's a magic city."

"It's just like any other place."

"It isn't. It's mysterious here in Brooklyn. It's like -- yes -- a dream. The houses and streets don't seem real. Neither do the people."

I wish the novel offered some corroboration for the claim of Brooklyn's magic and mystery. If it was there, I didn't find it in this grim novel, nor at the corner of Newkirk and Coney Island Avenues where I first came to awareness.

The "tree that grows in Brooklyn" is the so-called 'tree of heaven," ailanthus altissima. Smith has chosen it as a symbol of resilience, for the tree of heaven can thrive under the most inauspicious circumstances. I, for one, can remember playing on the roof of one of those six story apartment houses so common in our neighborhood, and noticing an ailanthus growing right out of the asphalt. I was astonished. But I wish that Betty Smith had chosen a different tree to invest with meaning, because the ailanthus is, frankly, a "trash tree."  It's generally considered a noxious weed, an invasive species. It grows rapidly but is short-lived. Its wood is soft and useless. It suckers vigorously and eternally, pours forth strong alleopathic chemicals upon its neighbors, invades subterranean sewers and pipes, is extremely fecund, and stinks. It is known to gardeners and foresters not as the "tree of heaven" but as the "tree of hell." It's not a tree that often finds itself celebrated in fiction. Nor in pastoral. Brooklyn, my Brooklyn, was a city of magnificent oaks, maples, sycamores and elms. My people, my fellow Brooklynites, deserve a more distinguished avatar than the tree of of so-called heaven.

Some will remember that T. S. Eliot once referred to the tree that grows in Brooklyn as the "rank ailanthus."

What I Read: 2021

I decided to keep a record of the books that I read this past 2021. It's in roughly chronological order, starting just about a year ago. It's an eclectic bunch; after years of being forced to be a specialist I've reverted to my natural dilettantism. I've probably forgotten some books, both my record-keeping and my memory not so good as before.

Here they come (long drumroll):  three novels by Lewis Grassic Gibbon: Sunset Song, Cloud Howe, and Grey Granite (the first is a masterpiece); Derek Wilson,  Charlemagne: a Biography; Park Honan, Christopher Marlowe, Poet and Spy; John Heisey, A Checklist of American Coverlet Weavers; H. L. Allen, American Coverlets of the Nineteenth Century (taught me a lot about Jacquard coverlets); Eric Sloane, Museum of Early American Tools and A Reverence for Wood; Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail, Edna O'Brien, In the Forest (a forceful novel); Evelyn Piper, Bunny Lake is Missing (which I read because I was curious about the film of the same name); Patrick Svensson, The Book of Eels; Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns (a long important book which would have been even better if it had been edited to 2/3's its size); Benjamin Kilham, In the Company of Bears (a fascinating book set just south of us in Lyme, NH); James Essinger, Jacquard's Web, Steven Vogel, Why the Wheel is Round (which it isn't; it's circular); Elizabeth Barber, Women's Work, the First 20,000 Years; J D Schein, Coverlets and the Spirit of America; Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread (by one of the most reliable of contemporary novelists); Elizabeth Barber, Prehistoric Textiles (a fascinating story); Thomas Stumpf, South St. Louis Boy, v. ii, by my graduate school classmate and friend; William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham, Andy Horowitz, Katrina (sad story of governmental and bureaucratic incompetence in New Orleans); Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House; George Eliot, Middlemarch (what, fifth time?  or sixth?); Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot, the Last Victorian; Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (another perennial favorite); John Le Carre, The Mission Song; Jane Austen, Persuasion;  Klyza and Trombulak, The Story of Vermont (summer reading); Harry Reed, Harry, Scenes from my Life (another autobiography by a friend); Shaun O'Connell, Assembled Pieces, Selected Writings; Alice Munro, Carried Away; David Lee, Chainsaws, A History; Seymour Gitin, The Road Taken (reminiscences of one of Lynn's relatives-in-law); Louis Menand, Cold War (all 800 pages!); Lisa Genova, Remember;  Mark Harris, Mike Nichols; H. L. Gates, The Black Church; Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders (twice); Madalaine Bohme, Ancient Bones; Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews (to 1492); John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words; two remarkable novels by Shirley Hazzard: The Transit of Venus, and The Great Fire (read twice); Valerie Trouet, Tree Story; James Shapiro, Shakespeare in a Divided America; Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; Joshua Hammer, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu; Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn; Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones; Paula Fox, Desperate Characters.

I've started on a reading project for 2022: books about Brooklyn. Will I persist? The crowd is in an uproar, waiting to see how it goes. Look for a report same time, same station, next year.

A Scots Quair

I've given over the last week or ten days to Lewis Grassic Gibbon's A Scots Quair and I'm very pleased to have done so. And I'm embarrassed that I've only now read this strange brooding wondrous series of novels. How could I not have known? For those equally as ignorant as I, the Quair is a trilogy -- Sunset Song (1932), Cloud Howe (1933) and Grey Granite (1934). Together they tell the story of Christine Guthrie from childhood -- about the turn of the century -- through the years of the Great Depression. I can't remember reading a piece of fiction that has so thoroughly engaged me, or encountering  a fictional character so fully realized as Chris Guthrie Tavendale Colquhoun Ogilvie.

Here's a picture of Gibbon (birth name: James Leslie Mitchell) who died at age 34 from a botched surgery.

The novels do for the northeast corner of Scotland what Thomas Hardy did for the southwest of England. Gibbon's corner of Scotland is traditional agrarian society beset by doctrinaire religion, industrialization, war, and the Great Depression. The novels range from extremely brutal to marvelously lyrical. They are not without defect: sometimes too long, often too preachy. Occasionally, I felt that I was being treated to a Scottish version of "orientalism": Scotism, perhaps. The books want condensation, editing; sometimes I felt that I was reading a first draft -- but Gibbon wrote fifteen books in seven years, so signs of haste are inevitable. Gibbon might be called a local colorist or a social realist, but he's much more. His feel for the landscape and for history is unparalleled.

In subject matter and tone, A Scots Quair reminds me most of Halldor Laxness's great Icelandic novel, Independent People. It's also like one of Hardy's Wessex novels, but funnier, more playful, and yes, more sensual. There are stream-of-consciousness speeches that recall Faulkner and passages that might have been written by James Joyce (not the Joyce of Ulysses but the Joyce of Portrait).  A much neglected masterpiece. 

Douglas Bush's Milton Course

In the mid 1980s, thirty-five years ago, I was 'in residence' for a week at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., researching an article on one of the lesser English Renaissance dramatists -- a pleasure as well as a condition of employment. The article that I completed turned out to be not a bad piece of academic prose, if I do say so myself, but not something for the ages either. It was a mere twenty years since I had completed my degree in "English and American Language and Literature" at a Large Eastern University, specifically Harvard. I was not drawn to the Folger for professional reasons only. It was a delight and a great privilege to hold in my very own hands and to read dozens and scores of four-hundred-year-old ephemeral books that -- more than the canonical literature -- helped me to understand the age of Shakespeare. Sermons by the wagonload, biblical commentaries, almanacs, political pamphlets, poems by minor and unknown versifiers, broadsides, medical textbooks, collections of jokes, how-to-write-a-letter-in-Latin trots, schoolbooks. The library possessed inexhaustible troves of such material. The Folger's plenty licensed my dilettante brain to follow its own naturally wayward inclinations.

While doing my duty and also having some fun, I fell in with a fellow Folgerite named Boyd Berry who was visiting from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. Over cups of coffee, Boyd and I discussed some of the less well-known writers of the period in whom we shared a mutual interest. I remember that we also talked about the teacher's perennial frustration at engaging the interest of our sometimes less-than-enthusiastic students. I do not remember what prompted me to ask Boyd this question: "what was the worst course that you ever took either as an undergraduate or graduate student." He replied, without hesitation, "Douglas Bush's lecture course on Milton at Harvard in 1961." I was flabbergasted, in part because I hadn't guessed that Boyd had been at Harvard during my years there, but more because I had enrolled in exactly the same course -- same time same station same year -- and because Douglas Bush's Milton course was also my own nominee for the worst course ever. Parallel lines had accidentally and miraculously met, so to speak. Although Boyd and I were the same age, he was one year behind me and had taken the course as a senior undergraduate while I had been a first-year graduate student. It seemed an astonishing coincidence, but then, the universe of students of English Renaissance literature is a small one. Nevertheless, the fact that we shared the same opinion about Professor Bush's course was comforting and, as they say, "validating." Boyd said out loud words that I had only speculated upon in petto. Perhaps I wasn't the only outlier.

Why were we in such accord? The obvious answer is that Professor Bush, then in the tail end of his much-celebrated career (he had uttered his infant cries during Grover Cleveland's second presidency), was tired and bored by his teaching and put little heart into the work. In brief, he droned, unconscionably. Not only did he drone, but it seemed as though there was an invisible shield between his podium and our seats. He didn't speak to us -- he addressed the empyrean. His lectures consisted of a superficial running commentary on Milton's poems. "There's a particularly lovely passage starting on line 695," -- as if a challenging idea would be beyond our collective capacity. If a student broke into the drone to hazard a question, Professor Bush's characteristic answer was, "Well, that seems self-explanatory." But Bush's classroom style was not the only reason for my unhappiness; I had more substantive concerns. 

Let me interject a few words about Professor John Nash Douglas Bush. Although almost forgotten today, Bush was by all odds the most formidable and learned literary scholar of his generation. He knew everything there was to know about English, Romance, and classical literature and had written a dozen comprehensive critical and historical books. If the gossip can be trusted, he greeted the dawn of each new day by reading two hundred lines of Latin poetry and a hundred of Greek. I am sure that he knew more about John Milton than Milton knew about himself. He had edited the volume of Milton's complete poetry (English, Latin, Greek, and Italian) and, astonishingly, had memorized the entire twelve books of Paradise Lost. He was an exacting scholar and a stylish and witty writer. Moreover, he was a kindly, gentle man, cordial and generous to his students -- even to me. If he had flaws of character, I didn't know of them. To my mind, he was an unimpeachably excellent person and scholar -- and at the same time a teacher from whom I learned just about nothing.  

I was once invited -- along with a clutch of my ambitious graduate-school classmates -- to some sort of reception at Professor Bush's Cambridge residence. His home was exactly as it should have been -- that is to say, if one were making a movie about a distinguished Harvard professor, one's location scout would not rest until he discovered the Bush quarters. It was a spacious and civilized home presided over by gracious Mrs. Bush, who was also exactly as she should have been. I remember that the giant main room in the house -- which must once have been two or more large rooms that had been sutured together, was Professor Bush's enormous study. It was more like an institutional library than something to be found in a private home. Just as one would expect, the study was lined floor to ceiling with handsome wooden bookcases chock full of an enviable display of publications in many languages, some of which I could identify. I remember being served sherry, I think, and also something preternaturally green and fishy on an unfamiliar but I'm sure very elite kind of cracker. This dream of an academic utopia filled me with envy. It also scared the living blazes out of me. Why? Because for all Professor Bush's elegance and his library, and his lovely deferential wife, his movie-set home struck me as soft, fey, self-satisfied, and bloodless. I was dazzled and intimidated by its splendors but at the same time wary and resistant. Only five years beyond crowded Erasmus Hall High School in darkest Brooklyn, I knew myself well enough to know that, however seductive, his style of life was not for me. I would have to find a more appropriate path. 

Now I want to step further back and report on two cases in which I was in conflict with Professor Douglas Bush. Actually, the conflicts were only on my side; Professor Bush, Olympian and serene, did not notice -- nor should he have, frankly. These incidents continue to haunt me to this day, sixty years after the fact. Both occurred not in the Milton course, but in an "advanced" seminar called "Science and Humanism in the Seventeenth Century." I must explain that the word "humanism" did not carry the meaning that it does today, as in the phrase "secular humanism" -- an approach to the natural world that is allied with agnosticism and which sometimes resolves into pure atheism. Professor Bush's humanism was the altogether different "Christian humanism." It was, in brief, the noble but ultimately unsuccessful Renaissance attempt to fuse the "inspired" and "revealed" truths of Christianity with the thoughtful, upstanding but unfortunately "natural" morality of the Greeks and Romans. If "Christian Humanism" could be distilled to a sentence, it would be Desiderius Erasmus' daring speculation -- that he would like someday to be able to say, "Sancte Socrates, ora pro nobis", or "Saint Socrates, pray for us."

I was a humanist of the secular variety -- by birth, inclination, education and because in my brain there was no place, not even a lone neuron, where "faith" or "prayer' or "worship" might in more standard heads be lodged. Bush, on the other hand, was not just a scholar of Christian Humanism, he was an honest-to-god trapped-in-amber Christian Humanist -- and a devout one, deeply rooted and entirely comfortable in late medieval/early renaissance thinking. In his seminar on Science and Humanism, humanism was right and just, and science, its antagonist, was, if not altogether bad, at a minimum a very dangerous alternative. Did not both Bacon and Descartes assert that "nature" -- the real world -- could be studied directly, on its own terms, rather than as an entity infused with god's being and majesty. That we mortals might study nature not to reaffirm the goodness and omnipotence of god, but to accumulate objective knowledge and to reap practical material benefits. It's a fact that the separation of nature from the "truth" of religion has over the centuries unquestionably led to the marginalizing of Christian thinking and therefore, according to Bush's view of the world, to the steep decline of civilization. The world, no longer driven by revelation, has been going to hell in a heathen hand basket, as Professor Bush said or implied every Tuesday at 4:00 pm.

Regular readers of this blague as well as Dr. Metablog's family and friends will recognize that Youthful Me did not accept Bush's premises. In fact, in those days, I was probably even less open to religious ideas than I am now. And therefore, each Tuesday was a day of discomfort.

And then, one afternoon, Professor Bush began the allotted two hours by launching a surprise assault on the then-new and controversial Third Edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The Third had shocked traditionalists. Until 1962, dictionaries had been "prescriptive "-- that is, they explained how language "should" be used and they stigmatized as colloq. or subst. [substandard] those words or expressions that fell beneath the bar. The Third forsook tradition and was not prescriptive but descriptive. It aimed to record the language as it was really used. The Third therefore included many words hitherto banned as slang or vulgar and it was loose and permissive with regard to "shall" and "will", and "imply" and "infer," etc. For Professor Bush, the Third was a plunge into darkness -- another example of the collapse of Western Civilization as we know it, or should know it. So he excoriated the new dictionary and its editors and its supporters. The tirade having been completed, he turned mildly to the class and asked if anyone present had a different opinion. Now I had learned a little about modern linguistics at Cornell, and I was a descriptivist both by education and democratic instinct, and I knew that Bush was completely out of step with contemporary thought. I was astonished to discover that I knew more about this particular field of knowledge than he. But, alas, I was totally intimidated and did not open my mouth. What abject cowardice on my part! Nary a word did I say, and so the class segued to a discussion of the Cambridge Platonists and their vain attempt to tame and assimilate Descartes and Spinoza. I still wonder if any of the other 2G's around the table were aware of my shame. Probably not -- did my peers, the late Arthur Oberg, the late Jake Mills, the late Brian Hepworth, the late Terry Logan, the late Bill Godshalk, and others whose names I have forgotten, notice my moral collapse? I suppose that it's too late to worry. Nevertheless, my failure to raise my hand and voice still humiliates me, still rankles. 

Another Tuesday, another surrender. In 1961, William Empson published his innovative study, Milton's God. While Empson was not as learned as Professor Bush (no one was) he was a much more imaginative and challenging reader. Some say that after Johnson and Hazlitt, Sir William has been English literature's most insightful critic. Empson was an intellectual and social dissenter (he had been banished from Magdalen College, Cambridge when a condom [horrors!] was discovered among his possessions). He had written two highly influential critical books that every serious mid-century student of literature studied -- the first on ambiguity, the second on pastoral. Empson read Paradise Lost through a very different lens than Bush. He was not a Christian; in fact, he confessed himself anti-Christian because he judged there to be a serious moral flaw at the heart of the religion -- that the sacrifice of Jesus was a highly elaborated form a scapegoating. About Paradise Lost, he concluded that God (that is, the character God in the epic) was confused and contradictory, repeatedly tying himself into logical and rhetorical knots in order to justify the unjustifiable. He also argued that irrespective of Milton's intention, the character God became more complex and interesting when he became less ideological and more dramatic; more, so to speak, human. He revered Paradise Lost, but for his own, not Bush's, reasons. Milton's God was trashed by Professor Bush, who dismissed Empson as a simple "village atheist." I was stunned. True enough that Empson was an atheist, but true also that he was a powerful thinker, not someone to be given the back of the hand with a flippant ad hominem. Bush's review came out in The New York Times on a Sunday; the following Tuesday, our teacher was lauded by my fellow seminarians. He basked in their admiration. Did my young colleagues genuinely agree with Bush, or were they egregious sycophantic toadies? I don't know and will never know. And then, after the celebration, Bush asked, as if he were open-minded, "Does anyone here have a different opinion?" If Empson had been summarily dispatched, what chance had I? So once again, I fled the field, remained mute -- and slunk deeper into my expensive leather chair. 

So there they were, my two abject failures of nerve.

 

Have I flagellated myself sufficiently? 

 

But now I also remember a third Science and Humanism event -- the Tuesday that Professor Bush fell asleep.

 

The class routine was for members of the seminar to offer a ten-minute presentation on the topic of the day, after which Professor Bush would initiate discussion with the unfocussed inquiry, "Any questions, or comments? " At which point I would yearn for my Cloak of Invisibility. One fatal day, the student in question was John Knott, a fine and intelligent youth but not a ball of fire, oratorically speaking. When he brought his effort to a close, there at the head of the table sat Professor Bush, eyes closed, breathing rhythmically, his large round head bobbling on his small round body, lost in blissful slumber. A few seconds went by, then some more seconds, a minute, a minute and a half. Thanks be to all the gods in the pantheon that he did not snore! And yet there we all were, arrayed around that splendid dark mahogany table, frozen. No one moved or even twitched, no one spoke, no one made eye contact with a fellow sufferer. No one breathed. It was unbearable. At last, after another twenty or so ticks of the clock, I had endured all I could endure, and I raised my Complete Poetry of John Milton into the air and was just about to let it slam, when Professor Bush opened his eyes, and without the slightest acknowledgement that something unusual had occurred, intoned the familiar words: "Any questions, or comments?" 

 

I do not recall this event in order to nip at Professor Bush's revered heels. Every teacher is entitled, occasionally in a long career, to lose focus while a beginning graduate student discourses on a volume such as Henry More's Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness (an important-in-its-own-day [1660] monograph eloquent in support of rational providentialism and the preexistence of the soul). For all I know, Professor Bush may have been exhausted because he had been up past the midnight hour Monday night, possibly contributing more to scholarship in an evening than I did in an entire career. In hindsight, it was not the sleep itself that distressed me -- it was the passivity and silence of my fellows -- and the fact that when I remained silent I  honored the charade, the falsehood, that Bush was not asleep. Faced with an emperor's-new-clothes opportunity, I punted. 

 

Just as I had failed to defend modern linguistics, had failed to defend the "village atheist," so I failed to bang my book on the board -- an act which would have been forthright and honest and true to myself. The first two events were disgraces of an intellectual kind; the third was one of manners and, I think, of social class. The alliance of Bush and Harvard had overwhelmed me, taken from me my natural freedom of action. Let me confess that it was a secret guilty pleasure to have been accepted into Harvard's kind embrace. I feared banishment. Would I have still been welcome, would I have been worthy, would I have been a gentleman if I had noisily ended the nightmare. I felt, and I feel to this day, that all of us around the table were in an implicit, unacknowledged conspiracy not to notice the obvious so that we could protect the reverend professor and therefore defend the institutions that he exemplified. We contrived not to notice Bush's well-earned snooze because to do so would have punctured the balloon. It would been bad manners, barbaric manners, and to exhibit bad manners in a wood-paneled seminar room would mean that we were not genteel, not civilized, unworthy of Harvard and of the privileges it bestowed on us. 

 

On the other hand, I myself had only twenty-two years on my scrawny back, and was just five years out of rambunctious Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush, where if a teacher were to fall asleep in class, he would within seconds have been met with derisive catcalls and a squadron of paper airplanes. And I admit that, although I conformed myself superficially to the ways of my "betters," I had enough of a residual catcall-and-paper-airplane soul that I have regretted my inaction now these sixty years. 

 

Family, friends and stray internet pilgrims: perhaps you think that I'm making too much of these trivial long-ago-and-far-away events. Far too fraught, too melodramatic. Are you not, readers, skeptical of the idea that he (that is, me) honestly believes that the essence of his being was threatened by a seminar in seventeenth-century European humanism? Possibly you also think that I exaggerate the gap between Harvardity and Brooklynity. So let us return to early 1960s and re-examine the historical context of these events.

 

I have reported on Douglas Bush's theological convictions; let us now turn to his retrograde views on education.

 

Bush was, without question, an unapologetic elitist. I don't mean "elitist" as the word is now popularly used -- as an all-purpose insult to those who are presumed to think that they are better than we because they are wealthy or have studied to a prestigious college. I mean elitist as in "snob." Bush was an elitist because he felt that education was only for the elect. Once you admit ordinary, common folk, by golly, the end is near. He was blunt: "education for all, however fine in theory, in practice ultimately leads to education for none." He deplored the ungenteel idea that "students [would] come to college out of a desire for economic or social advantage." Let them stay in the places to which they were born! In a still shocking moment of undiluted social and racial snobbery, he pronounced that "the rising flood of students is very much like the barbarian invasions of the early Middle Ages." "Barbarian invasions"? His metaphor is "self-explanatory," is it not?  Bush presented himself as a guardian at the gate, protecting Christian Europe from the wild-eyed, uncivilized incursions of Lombards and Visigoths. And how was I to understand the analogy?  Did it not apply to me? Was I a civilized European or was I a violent Vandal? In theory, once I was admitted to Harvard's sacred precincts, I became an insider. But in reality, in my heart, I could identify only with the migratory hordes. Although I was camouflaged by my thrift-store jacket and tie, and I did not bring my seax to class, did not subsist on mare's milk, and felt no urge to sack Harvard, I knew myself to be, in essence, an interloper -- an abominable Avar, or brutal Bulgar, or horrible Hun. Or, in my particular case, a member of the tribe of anxious Ashkenazim. 

 

So now let us circle back to the beginning. Why was "Douglas Bush's Milton course" the worst class ever? For me, it was not just because Bush regularly lulled his classes to sleep. It was also because in his illiberal hands, John Milton, my John Milton, was diluted and distorted. I was, ante Bush, an admirer of Milton's courage and I was infatuated with his poetry. Milton is the only poet in the language, I believe, who ever equalled Shakespeare. Lycidas (written in 1636, the year of Harvard's founding) is in my opinion the world's single best poem. In tribute, I had memorized its 193 glorious lines. Moreover, Milton was a truly admirable human being. He was the furthest left, the most radical figure in the whole of English literature and perhaps in western literature. Did he not defend the execution of Charles I and the end of monarchy?  Did he not argue that marriage should be based not on dynastic alliances, but on love and sexual compatibility? Did he not authorize every individual to interpret the Bible in his own way, without the interference of a church or its priests and ministers -- the "priesthood of all believers?" And was it not true that he composed the Areopagitica, a seminal, essential contribution to freedom of thought?  But for Bush, I regret to say, Milton's impassioned advocacy of human dignity distracted from his poetry. He daydreamed in class about the poems Milton might have written if he hadn't allowed himself to be waylaid and distracted by politics. My Milton, on the other hand, was as much a public man as a poet. He had willingly given twenty years of his life and his precious eyesight to work for the radical transformation of society and for human freedom. Bush's judgment was in my opinion a major error, a disabling error, and it meant that the professor, however knowledgeable, was so blinkered by his conservative ideology that he missed the defining points of Milton's life. Just as I could not fully embrace Bush's Milton, he could not or would not ever fully grasp the greatness, the importance of my Milton. It therefore irked me to sit and listen every day, while Milton's contribution to world history was neglected, discounted, or dismissed. It hurt. 

Montaigne, Kinship with

There is no author with whom I feel greater kinship than with Michel de Montaigne and there's none with whom I've passed more hours and days, except for Shakespeare. For many years, Montaigne's Essais has been my bedside companion, first in the old Everyman Library edition as translated by John Florio, a book which I early discovered among my father's small collection, and latterly in the 1958 version by Donald Frame. Of the two writers, Shakespeare is the greater, but he is unknowable and certainly not a comrade. "Negative capability" -- and all that. Shakespeare, the human being, lies hidden behind a profusion of characters and borrowed stories. Sometimes I think I can catch a glimpse of the man himself in recurring images or in a repeated motif, but how can I be sure? It's all guesswork and supposition. Shakespeare is an auctor absconditus. He can be admired, even revered, but he's too mysterious ever to be a pal. Montaigne, on the other hand, is insistently present. He talks directly to me, guy to guy, teaches me, argues with me. Even though there's a universe of differences between me and this astonishingly erudite sixteenth-century French Catholic skeptic, I feel that we are good friends.

Why the kinship? Montaigne is so various, so mutable, so inconsistent, that he's difficult to define, but nevertheless exhibits traits with which I l am in deep sympathy. Of all the important thinkers, he's the least systematic -- which is a benefit, at least for me. I can't make heads or tails of his near-contemporaries Spinoza or Descartes because both are too orderly and logical for my unsubtle head. But Montaigne works differently -- he advances an idea, modifies it, retracts it, illustrates it with a dozen anecdotes, and then announces that he can't come to a definitive conclusion -- which is the way my mind works, although obviously at a much lower order. And then Montaigne's brain is a hodgepodge, a gallimaufry of formidable learning strewn in heaps, like the last scene of Citizen Kane. So is mine, although it's a cramped attic compared to Montaigne's warehouse. And of course, Montaigne writes almost exclusively about himself, as I do in these fragmentary blague entries.

Moreover, we both seem to be at least in part writing for the same purpose. I compose these essaylets for what I conceive of, pretentiously, as dynastic reasons. Because I I so much wish that I had some artifacts or writing of my grandparents or great-grandparents, who left nothing behind, no scrap remaining, I want my descendants to have something of mine. Montaigne agrees: "What a satisfaction it would be to me to hear someone tell me of the habits, the face, the expression, the favorite remarks, and the fortunes of my ancestors. How attentive I would be. Truly it would spring from a bad nature to be scornful of even the portraits of our friends and predecessors, the form of their clothes and their armor." [Montaigne came from a family with a strong military tradition, unlike mine, which is epitomized by grandfather's desertion from the Russian army.] "I keep their handwriting, their seal, the breviary and a peculiar sword that they used, and I have not banished from my study some long sticks that my father ordinarily carried in his hand." I have no "sticks," but as I sit here pecking at the word processor, I see out of the corner of my eye my father's library ladder, used for retrieving just the right law book.

Montaigne is not done with the topic. He continues by exploring an idea about which I also have ruminated. For whom do I devote these hours, if not for myself?  He is eloquent upon the subject.

"If no one reads me, have I wasted my time, entertaining myself for so many idle hours with such useful and agreeable thoughts. In modeling this figure upon myself, I have had to fashion and compose myself so often to bring myself out, that the model itself has to some extent grown firm and taken shape. Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book that my book has made me -- a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life....  Have I wasted my time by taking stock of myself so continually, so carefully. For those who go over themselves only in their minds and occasionally in speech do not penetrate to essentials in their examination as does a man who makes that his study, his work, and his trade, who binds himself to keep an enduring account, with all his faults, with all his strengths."

I wish I could say that I'm as honest as Montaigne; I'm not. I recognize that the "me" that appears here is to some degree different from the me that is me. Although I do not lie about myself, I conceal some of my most flagrant deficiencies. Nor do I blow my own small trumpet. As a result, the portrait that has emerged is solider and also less troubled than the true-to-life person. Don't say I didn't give you notice, unwary descendants. 

Basketball in My LIfe

My father, who was born in 1904, was a basketball enthusiast when the game was in its infancy. He played guard on Eastern District High School's team and later played as a freshman at CCNY under legendary coach Nat Holman. But Dad came from an impoverished family and left college after one year because, he told me once, "I couldn't see how I could stay in school when my family needed so much." So while his formal education went by the wayside, he was able to make up the difference by a lifetime of reading. And although he was not a complaining sort, it was clear to me and I think to my brothers that he felt a bit grieved that his formal athletic career had been cut so short. He kept at it, though, on his own. Well into his forties, he was absent from family dinner one night a week. "Wednesdays," my mother explained, long before I could understand what the words meant, "your father goes to the gym." And Saturday mornings, in warm weather, were reserved for tennis. Dad very much wanted his three sons to carry on his athletic tradition, but I think, in retrospect, that in the long run we all disappointed him. Both my brothers were fine athletes although not big or fast enough for professional careers; I was, alack and alas, a disappointment. Dad, who had also been a semi-pro catcher in baseball, taught Gene and Jon how to throw an "inshoot" and an "outshoot," but he could not bring himself to coach me because it was obvious that with my 55 mile an hour fastball and scattershot arm, I wasn't going anywhere, pitching-wise, and although he showed me a couple of basketball moves he was, I recognize, a bit embarrassed by my want of athletic skill. (In my defense I must report that although I was more academic than athletic, I was voted "class athlete" by my P. S. 217 (8-5) eighth grade class -- a group which must have been, now that I think of it, quite a collection of klutzes). My older brother was a good enough basketball player to play for his college team for a year, and my younger brother was an outstanding sandlot all-star in baseball who once struck out Joe Torre, who, it will be remembered, finished his major league career with a .300 lifetime average. (The second time he pitched to Torre, my brother says, the future MVP hit a ball that "is still circling the earth.") I myself had the briefest career on the diamond. The pinnacle of my experience was that, once, playing second base, I turned a double play -- took the toss from the shortstop, stepped on the bag, gracefully wheeled, and pegged the ball perfectly to the first baseman. It happened once and once only, but it was glorious -- definitely a Hall of Fame moment. The peak of my basketball career occurred in the slippery court (which doubled as a dance floor) in the basement of the Flatbush Jewish Center on Coney Island Avenue and Avenue J. I was, I estimate, thirteen years old. Wearing number 3, in black and gold, I was steaming down the left side of the court on a fast break and was forced away from the basket, so instead of a layup I managed a sweeping running left-handed hook which caught nothing but net. There was modest applause. None of my teammates guessed that I had intended to bank the ball off the backboard and that it had slipped out of my hand and swished, entirely by accident. I only reveal this deep secret now, very now.  Another high point in my career: I once won a local foul shooting contest. I hit 23 of 25. One small caveat, though. The contest was conducted in the P.S. 217 schoolyard, where the baskets were, how shall I say this correctly, unsteady and soft. As a result, they were like sewers -- everything flushed. I doubt that I would have made 23 on a standard rigid rim. Nevertheless, I did win the medal and the other competitors all used the same ball and basket as I -- so, therefore, a modest triumph. And then playing basketball faded into the background, because I didn't get my growth until very late and for a while I was playing at 4' 11" or 5' 1" against hairy guys who had already reached their full mature height. But I continued to pursue my undistinguished career -- including the most competitive activity of my life -- three on three half court in the EHHS gym, one basket wins, and "winners out." And then a little intramural in Ithaca; an occasional pickup game in Cambridge. Oh, and twenty years later on, I played a bit with my own offspring, all three of whom were more athletic than I. My last pathetic hurrah (almost a decade ago, now) was being obliterated at h-o-r-s-e by my granddaughter Ella. 

Nevertheless, I retained my interest in the sport. No longer a participant, I became a serious spectator. I know enough about roundball to appreciate both player and play. For thirty years or so, I had a good seat at the home games of the CU Buffaloes -- it was high quality college basketball (although the Buffs rarely enjoyed a winning season). One source of interest and fun for me was to evaluate the talent and try to predict which of our guys (or the visitors') had the skill and size to move up to the next level. Over the years, I followed the early days of many a later NBA regular -- and even a couple of stars. I remember in particular Jay Humphries, who played four excellent seasons for CU and then averaged in double figures during an extended NBA career. Also local lad Chauncey Billups, "Mr Big Shot" himself. Andre Roberson, a terrific defender and rebounder who never lived up to his potential because he just couldn't master the corner three; Matt Bullard, a fine outside shooter; Scott Wedman; Alec Burks; Derrick White (still playing for Boston and getting better each year); and Spencer Dinwiddie, whom I didn't judge to be an NBA player but who has become a steady professional. The high point of my CU spectatorial career occurred in 2006 when the Texas Longhorns brought to our stadium a gangly teen-ager named Kevin Durant. One didn't have to be a sophisticated evaluator of talent to recognize that KD had a spectacular career ahead of him; it was grandly obvious. It took him only two years to lead the NBA in scoring. I stopped attending CU games when the athletic department, an independent entity with only a loose connection to the University, demanded that I make a donation of $400 for the privilege of purchasing season tickets. I resented the presumption, and I felt that there were many causes more worthy of my limited philanthropy than CU basketball. Although I stay away from our local Events Center, I'm still an occasional arena visitor. In fact, just last season, LERM and I bought incredibly expensive tickets to watch the Cavaliers take on the Pelicans at the Smoothie King Arena in New Orleans. The venue was up-to-date but way too brightly lit, and crowded, and noisy. Moreover, I dislike the theory that attendees must be continually entertained and placated with garish novelties. I don't go to basketball games for the half-time acrobats or the animal acts or the costumed dancers or the "kiss-cam" or the ear-popping "music" nor to be commanded when to cheer or when to chant "DE-FENSE." I go to watch and admire the players. Despite the distractions it was a good game, even though Zion Williamson was out with an ankle injury. These pros, even the unheralded ones, are fabulous athletes and they are especially impressive in person. 

So for most of my life it's been the electronic medium that has kept me abreast of the game. It all started with radio; I suspect that very few readers of this entry will be able to recall the fast-paced narration of Marty Glickman on WHN, but he was, let me tell you, a hoops artist who could bring the Knicks alive with voice alone. Then came television, sometime around the early 1950s. The thirteen inch black-and-white Dumont that my father acquired displayed an image that seemed miraculous at the time but paleolithically primitive compared to the 60" HDTV that entrances me nowadays. It's all present -- right there before my astonished eyes. Incredible no-look passes and sensational blocks and three-pointers from downtown -- and also horrid tattoos -- in brilliant color. In my TV-basketball saturated brain is stored the entire history of the NBA from then until now. In the 50s, Max Zaslofsky, Harry Gallatin, Sweetwater Clifton, Carl Braun, the McGuire brothers Dick and Al, and Ernie Vandeweghe, who played only home games because he was a full-time medical student. A team that was good but always managed to lose to the Celtics -- who had Cousy and Sharman and later Bill Russell, the Jones boys (Sam and KC), Havlicek and Heinsohn. I was in those years a most loyal and enthusiastic fan of our own New York Knickerbockers -- the championship teams composed of Willis Reed, Dave DeBusschere, Bill Bradley, Earl Monroe, and Walt Frazier, names and faces as present in my memory as the more celebrated Dodger boys of summer. Then came the Magic-Bird era, LA "showtime," Michael Jordan, Duncan-Ginobili-Parker-Popovich, and now LeBron James, who, although, he is certainly the most effective player in history, is less exciting to watch than his innovative contemporary, Steph Curry. During this last while, I've become a devoted GSW fan; when they were at their best, a few years ago, they played an extraordinarily beautiful game. There were nights when they'd score 30 baskets on 25 lovely assists. It's been a great ride that's now coming to an end, but there's another generation of players on the horizon and perhaps I'll be around long enough to enjoy them. After all, I've been there for the entire history of the NBA. What developments I have seen! What was once a local, coterie sport has gone international, with many of the best players coming from overseas or south of the border. Where once all the players, save a few, were White and middle-class, now 75% to 80% are Black and inner-city, bringing with them a heck of a lot of skill and flash and dazzle. Lumbering awkward centers, with their slow roundhouse hook shots, have been superseded by astonishingly mobile 7-footers who can protect the rim but also drift outside to nail a three. Salaries, in the old days, were little more than nominal and now there are marginal players making millions off the bench. The athletes have become celebrities -- and their shoes have become almost as famous as they are, and more lucrative. Franchises, which once went for a song, are now worth billions.

When I'm watching a game on a Sunday afternoon, I think about my father. I wish he could sit with me and discuss the progress of the sport. I'd like to show him what has happened since he left us in 1985. He'd like it that the players are bigger, faster, stronger, in better shape, and that the shooting is more accurate and the defenses more subtle and sophisticated. He'd love the pick-and-roll and the pick-and-pop. He'd appreciate the alley-oops and the accurate full court passes. I also know what he wouldn't like -- the overhasty three, the lenient interpretation of walking and palming, and the occasional showboating, Most of all, he'd hate it that the NBA is now in cahoots with the gambling establishment. He would see it, as I do, as a major miscalculation -- as a scandal waiting to happen. 

Every once in a while, even at this advanced age, I dream that I'm in the midst of a game, and I rise up and with an effortless flick of the right wrist launch a perfect 40-foot three that hardly even grazes the net. A childish fantasy, perhaps, but still very  satisfying.  

Where Have All the Native-Born 7-Foot Centers Gone?

Just about every NBA team now has a non-native 7-foot center on its roster. What's wrong with America -- can't we produce sequoia-size centers any more?  Except for Minneapolis-born Chet Holmgren, Oklahoma's incredible rookie, by jiminy they're all furriners. The last three MVPs, mirabile dictu, all big guys, originated elsewhere: Milwaukee's Giannis Antetokounmpo from Nigeria by way of Greece, Philadelphia's Joel Embiid from Yaounde, Cameroon, and Denver's Никола Јокић, more familiar to us 'Mericans as Nikola Jokic, from Sombor, Serbia. In addition, there's also awkward but effective Jonas Valanciunas on the New Orleans Pelicans, from Lithuania; GSW's Dario Saric from Croatia; Rudy Gobert, now blocking shots for Minneapolis (sharing center duties with New Jersey's big Kat) from France; Kristaps Porzingis, playing for the Boston Celtics (an exceedling lanky guy who seems to think he's a 7'3" guard) from Latvia; Chicago's Nikola Vučević, from Montenegro; Jusuf Nurkić, of the Phoenix Suns, formerly one of the "itch brothers", from Bosnia; Atlanta's Clint Capela, Swiss via Angola; Sacramento's Domantas Sabonis, who is a fine fine player but not as dominant as his father, Arvydas, from Lithuania  -- alongside his backup, Alex Len from Ukraine; the Clippers Ivaca Zubac, from Croatia; Houston's multi-talented Alperen Şengün, who leads the league in unusual diacritical marks, from Turkey; Portland's Deandre Ayton from the Bahamas; Pascal Siakam, playing for Toronto from Cameroon; Goga Bitadze from the other Georgia, playing for Orlando: and of course the latest teen sensation, France's Victor Wembanyama, from France. And I've probably forgotten one or two others.

Seven foot tall American centers, where have you gone? Why and wherefore? Diet? Environmental deterioration? Genetics? Disinterest?

It's not just a passing moment. Veteran NBA fans will remember Rik Smidt, Yao Ming, Hakeem Olajuwon, Dikembe Mutombo, Dirk Nowitzki along with such off the beaten track performers as Romania's Georghe Muresan and Sudan's Manute Bol.

Greek and Latin Basketballese

Now that we've at last come to the NBA playoffs and are heading toward another Warriors-Cavaliers showdown, it's fitting that we reflect on basketball jargon, which is distinguished by its many colorful monosyllables: hoops, hops, bigs, stuff, slam, jam, slash, dish, board, glass, dunk, pick, screen, paint, lane, point, wing, trey, rim, post, trap, "D", roll, box, press, tip, swish, bank, brick, feed, stroke, hole, "J", rock, range.

But down-home slang is not basketball's only linguistic register. 

Curiously, roundball jargon exhibits a contrary tendency toward polysyllabic words of Greek and Latin origin. Some teams, for example, are said to be "physical." "Physical" (from Gr. physicos = nature) means, in basketballese, simply "rough" and does not imply that the other team plays either an ethereal or spiritual game. It used to be that a guard played on the "outside" and a center on the "inside"; nowadays they've become "perimeter" (Gr.) and "interior" (L.) players. A fast break has become "transition offense." A player doesn't drive to the basket; he "penetrates." Players no longer jump; they "elevate"; they don't block an opponent's shot, they "reject" it. In an odd linguistic development, a point guard no longer passes the ball; he "distributes" (Latin: distribuere, to allot) it. In its ordinary signification, to "distribute" a basketball would be to cut it into pieces like a loaf of bread and give each teammate a slice, but not so in the language of basketball. Only a few years ago, it was still possible to "switch" from guarding one man in order to guard another; now players "rotate." "Rotate," derived from "rota," the Latin word for wheel, properly means "to turn on an axis, to spin." A defender who did not switch but rotated would pirouette, and pirouetting would not be an effective defensive strategy. (A better classical upgrade for switch would be "revolve.") Even sillier than rotate: "rotate over" or "rotate around"-- a usage that evokes the grotesquerie of a big guy in a tutu pirouetting across the baseline -- a vision that is all the more picturesque now that traditional basketball shorts have been replaced by big ol' floppy bloomers. Just last night I heard a TV announcer declare that a seven-foot tall player had "a lot of verticality." (I suppose that if he fell to the floor he would have lots of "horizontality"). Players don't score; they "convert," as in, "they had a transition opportunity  but failed to convert." They don't push an opponent out of the way;  no, no, no, -- they create space (Latin: creant spatium). Although I am not a physicist, I suspect that space is something like matter, and can therefore neither be created nor destroyed. At least not created by power forwards, however potent they may be. How silly of me to object; neither the laws of physics nor the usual constraints of language are binding on punditor basketballensis. OK, game's on; let's see how well they play -- oops, sorry, how well they execute.   

"Creating Space"

If you listen to the announcers of the NBA games, basketball players defy the laws and logic of physics. They "create space."

One of the greatest space-creators was Shaquille O. Others merely imitate his technique. His most characteristic play was to drive his massive left shoulder into the chest of the defender, knocking him backwards a couple of feet. When he had gained a sufficient advantage and had room to maneuver, he would flip the ball (awkwardly) toward the basket. HIs defender would as likely as not be charged with a foul while the pre-Newtonian announcers would celebrate him for 'creating space.' And a beautiful game would be transformed into a brutal game. 

And why is LeBron James allowed to create space on his every drive to the basket?  He's gifted enough that he doesn't need the advantage; but nevertheless, he routinely pushes off with his off hand, often lodging his off-elbow in the chest of the hapless defender.  

I often watch LeBron create space on hdtv where I've precorded the game. I can therefore watch the same play again and again. In doing so I stop time, or run time backwards. He creates space, I stop time.

So two can play at defying Einstein. 

NBA Aristocrats

There's Sir Charles Barkley, of course, leading the way, and all those Kings (Bernard, the king of Kings, but also Albert, Stacy and a score more). Dozens of Earls, including the diminutive Boykins, and my favorite, nomenclature-wise, Acie Earl. Also Brevin and many other Knights. Nor can we forget Marques Johnson or Marquis Teague. And Mel Counts, the 7' foot guard. Baron Davis, Walter Dukes, Tayshaun Prince. Royal Ivey. Let's not forget Mike "The Czar" Fratello.

While the big dipper was only a chamberlain, there's a notable double-dipper:  Earl Barron.

There must be many more. Help me, metablogians. Surely I've just scratched the royal surface.

March 29:  I can't believe that I forgot King James, who may be better than KD, but certainly less fun to watch.

My New Career - III

This blague's enthusiastic readers are well aware that each year for the last two, Dr. M. has made himself available for the NBA draft, but that not a single team has selected him, even the lowly, strife-ridden Knicks. It's incomprehensible, but true. Why are these GMs so unadventurous?  

As a consequence of being overlooked, I'm developing an entirely new marketing strategy this year. I'm no longer going to sit at home waiting for the telephone to ring. Heck, no!  I'm going to advertise my skills by competing in the dunking contest.  

I've developed three imaginative new dunks, any one of which could carry the day and get me the attention I require.   

The first is a variation of "making change." I drive to the basket, leap into the air with a basketball in my left hand. With the right hand,  I leave a quarter on the top of the backboard and take down the dime that's been previously placed there.With the left hand, I gracefully drop the ball through the net. 

My second dunk. I have a ball in each hand and put another one under my shirt. I spring, dunk both basketballs authoritatively and successively, then grab the third one and throw it high into the air. I land right under the backboard, and then, without pause, immediately spring into the air again and power that third one through just as it comes down into the cylinder.   

I've perfected these two moves, which, I can say without bragging, are far more interesting than anything I saw in the contest last year. To be absolutely honest, so far I've only done them with six-foot rim and with those mini-basketballs that they sometime distribute free during the second half timeouts. Not to worry -- I'm working on it every day and in a couple of weeks I'll be ready for the standard rim and full-sized basketball. There's still plenty of time before All-Star Weekend.

My third dunk is even more extraordinary. I start at the far basket and do a series of back handsprings and back flips across the floor. Then, as I approach the target basket, I pick up a basketball between my ankles, and with one final back flip -- in which my feet are actually above the level of the rim -- I slam that sucker home. It's going to be something spectacular to watch, I guarantee, just a soon as I work out a few kinks in the execution.

BASKETBALL ANNOUNCER EXHIBITS PROFOUND IGNORANCE OF BIBLE

I watched the Nuggets beat the living whatchamacallit out of the Toronto Raptors. Actually, I didn't watch the entire game -- it was a gruesome mismatch. I can endure only so much garbage time at a single sitting. The high point, for me, was a comment by one of our home team announcers (I'll not reveal his name). Toronto has a reserve point guard named Willie Solomon, who acquired the nickname "King Solomon" when he played for Maccabi Tel Aviv in 2005. "Must be a reference to the movie," suggested our announcer. 

I'm guessing that he means King Solomon's Mines.

Well, no one ever suggested that we consult TV announcers for knowledge of scripture.

 

CCNY Basketball Ups and Downs, 1950-51

My friend Otis Jefferson Brown reminds me of the crushing sports-and-morals tragedy of our joint childhoods. It all took place in 1950/51, when I was a creeping like snail to sixth grade in P. S. 217 and Otis, a child of Bay Ridge, was trudging his shining morning face to P.S. 102. Our guys, our local heroes, the CCNY basketball team, won both of the major basketball tournaments, the NIT as well as the NCAA. The city -- New York City, especially Brooklyn  -- was electric with excitement. Headlines, victory parades, and demonstrations in all the neighborhoods. 

The twin wins -- it never had happened before and will never happen again -- were great events in the public sphere but of even greater moment in our 9th Street home.  Back in the 1920s, my father had attended CCNY for a year, but like so many of the sons of impoverished immigrants, had to drop out to help put potatoes and black radishes on the family table. While at City, he had played on the freshman basketball team. Would he have made the varsity? Who can tell? He was a strong man, a fine natural athlete, very graceful in his movements even into his 70s, and very serious about basketball.

His coach had been Nat Holman (one of the earliest stars of professional basketball), and Nat was still the City College coach twenty-five years later. So whenever CCNY played, everything in our family came to a halt, and we all gathered around the wooden Philco to listen as my father's team went down to the wire against Bradley or Kentucky or Toledo. My father, generally a restrained man, was as partisan and as jubilant as I ever knew him to be. Not only were the victories a fulfillment of his own hopes, but they were all achieved by a bunch of local players -- Jews and "Negroes" from the Bronx and Brooklyn who, in those days, would not have been welcome at most of the big basketball powers. Ed Roman and Ed Warner and Irvin Dambrot and Normie Mager and Floyd Lane were household names as familiar and as admired as those of Koufax and Campanella. 

It was the very next year that it all blew up in our faces. The CCNY players, or many of them, confessed to taking bribes from the gamblers and bookies and to shaving points and managing the spread. There were indictments, "perp walks," headlines, indignant editorials. O the shame!

My father was devastated. Although in size he was just a scrappy guard, in person he was a tower of rectitude, and it was beyond his ken that our guys, even poor guys who desperately needed cash, would compromise their integrity and their futures for a few bucks.

My father turned the disgrace into a morality play. Every day, for years it seems in retrospect, I listened to still another passionate sermon about keeping to the straight and narrow. (Not that there was anyone in the world who would pay me to miss a shot; I could miss shots on my own. But I knew what he meant.)   

I've now read Charles Rosen's Scandals of '51, how the gamblers almost killed college basketball [New York, 1971]). It's a shoddy, melodramatic, disheartening book, but it does help to put things in perspective. Rosen makes it clear that there was more than a little American nativist glee about taking CCNY and its upstart culture down a peg. It was sad to read that players from many other colleges were also indicted (I hadn't remembered), but discouraging to learn that their defenders were happy to extol heartland values and to scapegoat the corruption onto big city immigrant depravity. It was also sad to be reminded that the only basketball player who served hard time was Sherman White, the biggest, the best, and the blackest of all the athletes. Nor was it pleasant to discover that although there were apparently point-shavers at St. Johns, a Catholic college, DA Frank Hogan brought no indictments because the evidence against the Red Men was "inadvertently" destroyed.

The events were a blight on my basketball-loving childhood. And still a great sadness after all these years. But I must say that we, as a family, engineered a strong comeback. It was only a few years after the scandals that one of those 13" black and white TVs with the rabbit ears made its first appearance in our home. And along with the Zenith came the NBA. I think that my father was on perpetual alert for signs of malfeasance, but our faith in the game and in humanity was restored by a new set of New York heroes: Harry Gallatin, Connie Simmons, Carl Braun, Dick McGuire, Bud Palmer, Vince Boryla, Sweetwater Clifton, Max Zaslofsky.   

"The Answer" is not the Answer

I never, ever, thought that the Denver Nuggets' acquisition of Allen Iverson was a good idea. He has skill, he has speed, and he's the most resilient guy in the world. He can do everything on a basketball court except win games. These last four losses against San Antonio prove the point. It's not just that last night he was 6 for 22;  it's that when the Nuggets come down the floor, whether Iverson eventually shoots or not, he clings to the ball and dribbles around while the rest of the team stands and watches. Iverson turns his teammates into spectators. Last night, Carmelo had three points in the fourth quarter; he barely touched the ball.  Nene, who can score off almost everyone down in the post, might as well have sat for the last twelve minutes.   

Of course it's clear that the Nuggets can't advance in the playoffs until they find themselves a reliable three-point shooter.

It's just as obvious that Iverson isn't going to become a team player; he's 31 years old and he's averaged 23 shots a game with a .422 percentage for an entire career. He's not going to alter his game, but he's definitely going to deteriorate. I'm afraid that we're stuck with him. Meanwhile, Philadelphia has done better with Andre Miller than with The Answer. In addition, we gave Philly two first-round draft picks to help them fill in their gaps. I like Philadelphia's chances;  I don't like ours.   

Too Many Fouls, Too Many Timeouts

Our local basketball team is in the Big 12. We're far from the best team in the league, but the Big 12 is a major conference and as a consequence we have the opportunity to see some well-played, exciting games and also a goodly number of excellent young players. Great athletes appear regularly, mostly, I must confess, on opposing teams, but we've sent a number of guys on to the NBA, including Scott Wedman, Jay Humphries and Chauncey Billups. Last week the U of Texas brought in a freshman named Kevin Durant. Remember the name -- he's going to cut quite a swathe in the NBA. I'm a fan; I've gone to almost every home game for twenty-five years or more. At its best, basketball is the most beautiful of team sports. But I have some serious bones to pick about the way the colleges play the game nowadays. Here are two of these many bones. 

a) Time outs.  Every four minutes there's a "media timeout," so that the TV stations, if there are any, can intrude their commercials. Media timeouts have everything to do with money and nothing at all to do with the sport. Media timeouts interrupt the flow. Team A is on a roll; the coach of Team B doesn't have to use one of this allotted legal timeouts to change the dynamics of the situation -- he just waits for the scheduled pause. Four extra timeouts in a half, at a minimum of a minute and a half each, add twelve minutes to the length of the game. And because each coach can hoard his legal timeouts, he has them all available at crunch time, which means that the climax of the game is far too frequently interrupted and the final moments become more the coaches' responsibility than the players'. 

b)  Fouls.  Too many ticky-tack fouls are called. The result -- teams are regularly "in the bonus" nine or ten minutes into the half. And into the "double bonus" four or five minutes later. All fouls -- offensive fouls, fouls away from the ball, incidental contact -- become shooting fouls. The first ten minutes of each half often have a pleasing rhythm, a bit of pace, but the second ten minutes are always stop-and-go; rarely is there a full minute of uninterrupted action. Boring?  You bet. Contests routinely turn into prolonged exhibitions of foul-shooting. A gazelle of a game now hobbled and shackled.

Our own basketball stadium is at altitude -- a mile high, in fact. Our opponents are almost always flatlanders. We should have an advantage because we're better conditioned to play at 5280 feet. But because the games are so long and punctuated by so many timeouts and fouls, our advantage is lost. No twenty-year-old is going to run out of breath when a forty minute game takes two and a half hours to complete.

Solution: a) no more "media timeouts." Oh yeah, I know, the teams need the money. Well, maybe there would be some revenue from increased attendance if the games were quicker and shorter and more exciting. b) better-trained and better-instructed referees. No bonus shots. No free throws except for fouls in the act of shooting. And teams should always be able to "decline the penalty," as they do in football, and take the ball out of bounds. Then there would be no incentive to foul in order to stop the clock. Take back the game from the coaches and from the referees. Let the young men play.

Common sense changes, in my carefully considered view, which, if adopted, would make life richer and more satisfying and more aesthetic.         

Hoop Words

Now that "March madness" is nearly upon us, it's appropriate to reflect on basketball jargon, which is distinguished by its many colorful monosyllables: hoops, hops, bigs, stuff, slam, jam, slash, dish, board, glass, dunk, pick, screen, paint, lane, point, wing, trey, rim, post, trap, "D", roll, box, press, tip, swish, bank, brick, feed, stroke, hole, "J", rock, range. 

But down-home slang is not basketball's only linguistic register. Curiously, there's a contrary tendency toward polysyllabic words of Greek and Latin origin. Some teams, for example, are said to be "physical." "Physical" (from Gr. physicos = nature) means, in basketballese, "rough" and does not imply that the other team plays either an ethereal or spiritual game. Until recently, a guard played on the "outside" and the center on the "inside"; nowadays they've become "perimeter" (Gr.) and "interior" (L.) players.  A fast break has become "transition offense." A player doesn't drive to the basket; he "penetrates."  Players no longer jump; they "elevate"; they don't block a shot, they "reject" it.

In an odd linguistic development, a point guard no longer passes the ball; he "distributes" (Latin: distribuere, to allot) it. In its ordinary meaning, to "distribute" a basketball would be to cut it into pieces like a loaf of bread and give each teammate a slice. Only a few years ago, it was still possible to "switch" from guarding one man in order to guard another; now players "rotate."  "Rotate," derived from the Latin word for wheel, means "to turn on an axis, to spin."  A defender who did not switch but rotated would pirouette, and pirouetting is not an effective defensive strategy. (A better classical equivalent for switch would be "revolve.")  Even sillier than rotate: "rotate over" or "rotate around"-- a usage that evokes the grotesquerie of a big guy in a tutu pirouetting across the baseline -- a vision that is all the more picturesque now that traditional basketball shorts have been replaced by big ol' bloomers.

March 5:  Last night I heard a TV announcer say that a seven-foot tall player had "a lot of verticality."  If he fell to the floor, I suppose that he would have "horizonality." March 27: Also, "convert" for score, as in, "they had a transition opportunity  but failed to convert."

My Teachers: James Hutton (1902-1980)

The most erudite man that I ever encountered in my own person was James Hutton, a professor of classics when I was an undergraduate at Cornell back there in the 1950s. Professor Hutton bristled with knowledge -- nor is this my opinion only, but one that is well attested by his international reputation and by the list of his writings. Hutton wrote two enormous books (800 pages each!!) that won him his scholarly spurs: The Greek Anthology in Italy (1935) and The Greek Anthology in France and in the Latin Writers of the Netherlands to the Year 1800 (1946). I encountered Professor Hutton in 1958 when, callow and poorly educated, I enrolled in a Latin course called "Terence and Catullus" (of which more later). But first, for those curious readers out there in bloglandia who are on tenterhooks, painfully stretched like new wool and are wondering what the heck is the "Greek Anthology" about which James Hutton composed his pair of magna opera and around which his life centered -- turn we now to the pages of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

In brief, the Anthologia Graeca is a collection of poems, mostly epigrams, that had a complicated ancient history, but originated perhaps with an anthology complied by Meleager of Gadara in the first century BCE, which brought together works by many ancients including Archilochus, Alcaeus, Anacreon and Simonides (all big names in their time). There were a series of early editions that do not survive but an authoritative version was made by Constantine Cephalas in the 10th century. "Cephalas appended a number of other collections: homoerotic verse collected by Straton of Sardis in the 2nd century AD; a collection of  Christian epigrams found in churches; a collection of satirical and convivial epigrams collected by Diogenianus as well as Christodorus's description of statues in the Byzantine gymnasium of Zeuxippos; and a collection of inscriptions from a temple in Cyzicus." And then in 1300 or thereabouts Maximus Planudes brought together an edition which became standard, which, while adding some poems, also deleted or bowdlerized many of those that offended his puritanical Christian sensibilities. Planudes' anthology was the only one known to Western Europe for many centuries; manuscript transmission was superseded when an edition based on his work was printed in 1494.

There's a lot more but that's enough information for us to understand the area which James Hutton worked. Professor Hutton knew the anthology backwards and forwards and made it his business to trace its considerable influence through the Latin and vernacular poetry of late antiquity and the medieval and renaissance worlds. Quite an endeavor, in my opinion.  

Hutton was a Scotsman, born in Airth, son of a sea captain, though from where I sat (in a small seminar room in Goldwin Smith Hall!!), it was impossible to imagine that he had ever been a child or even a young man. He came to the US early in life and there was not a trace of Scotland in his speech. Hutton entered Cornell as a freshman in 1920, received three degrees there, stayed on to teach, and retired in 1973. According to his Cornell obituary, he was a life-long bachelor. For most of his adulthood, he lived with his mother, Mrs. Elizabeth Hutton, and he shared a house for many years with Professor Lane Cooper, his teacher and another bachelor Cornell classicist. After the death of his mother and of Cooper, he continued to live at 123 Roberts Place with his cousin/housekeeper, Mrs. Margaret Green. Perhaps he was a delightful presence among his friends, but to my eyes he was a pale, tall, gaunt, dry-as-a stick, bony man devoid of humor or juice. Born only two years before my own father, he seemed to be generations older.  

Now a few words about Terence and Catullus, the twin subjects of my 1958 Latin classroom experience. 

Terence (Publius Terentius Afer) was Roman playwright possibly of Berber origin but certainly originally a north African slave. Brought to Rome and freed, he wrote six comedies, adapted from Greek originals, of which we students of Professor Hutton plowed through three: Andria (166 BC); The Self-Tormentor (163 BC) and the Adelphi (160 BC). Terence drowned on a trip to Greece, age 25. His must have been a marvelously romantic life, even though much curtailed. Too bad we know only its barest outline.

Here's the title page to the first "modern" edition of Terence's works (1496)

In Terence's plays, young noblemen dally with prostitutes or mistresses even as their fathers insist that they marry more respectable ladies. Plots, often contrived by the dull hero's wily slave, fail to come to fruition because the conspirators are carelessly overheard. Sometimes apparently unrelated women (one rich, the other poor), turn out to be sisters. Sham marriages and double-dealing are frequent. It is not uncommon that sons discover by accident, in the last scene of the play, the identities of their biological fathers. When there are plans to destroy female infants, the girls are rescued and raised secretly, only to come forward as beauties at a critical juncture of the plot. Young noblemen are prone to breaking into the houses of pimps to carry off the girls they love. Generally, plays end with multiple and suitable marriages, the old folks outwitted and the youngsters carrying the day. Slaves are freed.

Meanwhile, characters coin memorable aphorisms in succinct, elegant Latin. Everyone knows "Homo sum, nihil a me alienum puto"  -- I am a man, nothing human is alien to me.  But also quot homines tot sententiae: suus cuique mos -- So many men, as many opinions; to each his own way. And "fortis fortuna adiuvat" --  fortune favors the brave.  And "nullumst iam dictum quod nos dictum sit prius" --nothing new is said that has not been said before. And "amantium irae amoris integratio est" -- lover's quarrels are the renewal of love.

But with all these comic goings-on and witty sayings, there was not one moment that I can remember when Professor James Hutton laughed or smiled or indicated in the least that the plays were clever or amusing. Instead, we discussed grammatical questions with much emphasis on the differences between second century and first century Latin. Dry as dust, it was. The opportunity to find the common humanity of ancient Romans and 1950s Cornellians was missed, even shirked.

Terence's louche and lively plots must have posed a problem for Professor Hutton; Catullus of Verona, a poet of love and sex and bawdy, could only have caused even more of a difficulty. In the edition in which we read Catullus, a drab gray book which must have dated from the early part of the century, certain of the more scabrous poems were omitted but, in a moment of confused prudery, printed -- in a smaller font --in an appendix. I suspect that they were also bowdlerized. Some of the words that Catullus used in his freer verse were not to be found in our dictionary, which had also been cleansed. And in a translation that I consulted (was it the Loeb?) the offending poems did appear, but only in Italian. Was the idea that if anyone could read Italian he must be sophisticated enough to deal with Catullan pornography. Perhaps my readers think that I'm fantasizing or imagining this half-hearted censorship, but it's as true as true. Swear.

Even after all these years, two of Catullus's poems stay in my mind. The best, the most frequently republished and the most influential is known to classicists as Catullus 5. It's a remarkable poem. Here's the Latin, which is not difficult.

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus

Rumoresque senum severiorum

omnes unius aestimemus assis.

Soles occidere et redire possunt;

nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux

Nox est perpetua una dormienda

da mi basia mille, deinde centum

dein mille altera, dein secunda centum

deinde com milia multa fecerimus

conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus, 

aut ne quis malus invidere possitor

cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

And here's a translation. "Let us live, my Lesbia, and love. The gossipings of stern old men let us value at just one penny.  Suns may set and rise again, but us, when once the brief light has set, night is one perpetual sleep. Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand, then a second hundred, then yet another thousand, then a hundred, then when we have counted up many thousands, let us shake [the abacus] lest some evil man be envious when he knows how many kisses there were." That is to say, Let us keep on making love no matter what the old envious guys think. (Lesbia has nothing to do with lesbians; it's just code for the name of the married woman with whom Catullus was sleeping.)  

I have no recollection of any discussion of this peach of a poem in 1958. Perhaps we talked about the ingenious lux/Nox juxtaposition, but I am sure we didn't touch on either the boasted adultery or the joys of sex. We were still in the last gasp of Victoriana. We were pre-Beatles, pre-Kennedy, pre-readily available contraceptives. Some things were not to be discussed. 

The other poem that stands in my memory is Catullus 61, a joyous epithalamion (or marriage song) which celebrates, with great gusto, the wedding of Vinia and Manlius. It is sensual and almost hypnotic. It's frankness about sexual pleasure pleased me in 1958, when such things were rare. Still pleases me.

But what about the omitted poems, the ones too "coarse" for our tender eyes and ears?  How would James Hutton have dealt with them. Not at all, of course. But now, censorship and self-censorship and propriety eased, we can read the poem that begins Paedicabo ego vos et irrumabo. which I can now translate as "I will fuck you in the ass and then fuck you in the face." And goes on from there. Not part of the 1958 curriculum. In Professor Hutton's class, we were more comfortable discussing a synezis of the genitive than any exercise of the genitalia.

But I wonder, now, about, James Hutton, at home after a hard day of declining and conjugating, at dinner with his mother and his bachelor roommate. What did Professor Hutton think about Catullus's "paedicabo ego vos et irrumabo".

This I know: whether repelled or offended or secretly sympathetic, he certainly did not share his feelings with his students. 

World War II Memories

I was six years old when the war ended in 1945, so my memories are few and arise in no particular order. I remember hearing news reports on the radio that were datelined "Moscow"-- but I conflated Moscow with Bosco, a brand of chocolate syrup popular in the 1940s. I remember that the floor of our kitchen was disfigured with an infinite number of black marks -- rubber was in short supply and the substituted soles left nasty blotches. My mother said, "We'll wait until the war is over to replace the linoleum." Many commodities were in short supply: instead of butter there was a white oleomargerine into which a packet of orange food color was mashed to simulate a credible yellow. There were ration books and ration stamps for gasoline and sugar and coffee and greens. My mother was furious that Mr. Lerner, who owned the fruit and vegetable shop on 18th Avenue, sold black-market lettuces from the back of his store. A bus driver was rude to a passenger; my mother said: "all the decent young men are overseas." We saved our nickels and brought money to school to buy war bonds. Following government advice, my father dug up his carefully tended lawn and planted a "victory garden" of vegetables. There were frequent blackouts: my father's friend Jack Patent sported a white hard hat because he was a warden. My Uncle Dan, a major in the Army Air Corps, came home from the Burma border for a thirty-day furlough and showed me his captured German Luger. We received air mail letters from him and from other soldiers with details blacked out by military censors. I complained to my mother: "Mrs. Callery (my first grade teacher) isn't nice to me." My mother said, "You have to forgive her; she's lost four of her boys in the war." Lost?  Four of her boys? I did not understand. On a sunny spring day in 1945, we heard on the radio that President Roosevelt was dead; my mother sat on the stoop and cried. And in August of that same year, when our family was visiting someone on a lake somewhere, all of a sudden the adults who had motor boats were zooming back and forth and shouting and laughing. I asked what was happening and my father said, "the war is over." 

Uncle Jack's tank was demolished by German cannon fire and he was the crew's only survivor. He lived with shrapnel in his brain until the age of ninety-one. Cousin Saul's older brother was killed in New Guinea, but Sarah, his mother, "knew" that he was alive and waited for the knock on the door or the telephone call until the end of her days. Meanwhile, the poor fellow's bones lay bleaching at Buna or some other long-forgotten field of battle. Before the war, my mother told me, we used to receive mail from the old country -- from the many members of the Chafetz and Tomaszewski and Middlebank and Hessel families who had stayed behind. "But after the war, nothing."

Can we, even now, bear to imagine what became of all those Malkas and Rifkas and Levs and Mendels?   

What I Said at Our "Event"

"Thank you all for coming. We appreciate it more than you can possibly imagine. We've needed, and relied on, the support that all of you have given us.

It's no secret that both Lynn and I have gone through some difficult times. It's good to host a cheerful event.    

A number of people have asked us about our use of the word "wed" in the invitation that we sent to you. (We said, you remember, that we were 'wed" on June 30). I don't want to mislead you. We didn't mean to imply that we involved either state or church in our relationship. There didn't seem to be any point for us to get married legally. People marry for the sake of children, but we've decided that we're not going to have children.

Here's the story. Lynn and I wanted to acknowledge in a public way the seriousness and permanence of our friendship -- for our families, and, I think, especially for our grandchildren (there are ten of them). We wanted our families to know that our relationship wasn't like some streetcar or trolley that you hop on and hop off. So we decided to invite our most nuclear family to Lynn's backyard garden for a brief "ceremony" -- just my children and grandchildren, her children and grandchildren, her brother, my brother, the various spouses -- and pledge our love and fidelity. But then one of my daughters-in-law, Connie, said that we couldn't ask people to fly in from all over the USA just for a five minute ceremony. She suggested that we at least exchange rings. It seemed like a good idea. So we walked over to Classic Facets on the Pearl Street Mall and bought two not antique but vintage rings -- because we're vintage people. Handsome rings, as you can see. And then as long as everyone was coming here a day early we decided that we should have dinner the night before. And if you're going to have a dinner you might as well have some music. So gradually the "ceremony" evolved and grew. But more importantly -- and here's the point -- the meaning of the event evolved as well. It became more significant, more profound, more intimate. We never liked the phrase "commitment ceremony" or even the word "commitment" because it sounds as though you are being sent either to jail or to a mental institution, and we didn't have the vocabulary for what we intended to do. But little by little, while we planned the event, and even more so, after we performed the ceremony, we began to feel more and more married -- in all the positive senses of the word. We can now say "wed" and mean it. I haven't yet been able to say "husband" or "wife" but I suspect that one day in the not too distant future those words will manifest themselves. But the point is that in all the ways that matter, we are "wed."

When my Vermont friend Bert, who's just my age, got married 18 years ago, I said to him, Bert, is it real --that you're head over heels in love at age 60? At the time, it seemed so improbable. But now, here I am, just a year and a half short of 80, and setting out on a new life. And 60 seems like dewy youth.  

So let me repeat to you now what I said to Lynn on June 30. "I bring you my children and my grandchildren, my prosthetic tooth, my lens implants, my hearing aids, my non-standard but warm heart, and I take you and your children and grandchildren and your titanium hip and arthritic finger and I say, "let us make a life of it."

And let me just add that between us we have been married for 100 years (an average of 50 apiece). So we ought to know what we're doing.

And what we're going to do is to ride this old trolley right to the end of the line."

Jot and Tittle

First of all, let us dismiss the notion that Charles Dickens invented a pair of persnickety punctilious accountants and named them Jot and Tittle. Sorry, it could or should have been the case, but it's not so. Nevertheless, both "jot" and "tittle," often found in each other's cozy company, have stories to tell.

Take jot, for example. In the masterful "seduction scene" in Shakespeare's Othello, Iago first torments the Venetian general and then pretends sympathy: "I see this (i.e. his nasty sly hints that Desdemona has been a-bed with Cassio) hath a little dashed your spirits." Othello responds defensively, perhaps a tad dishonestly: "Not a jot, not a jot."

The noun "jot" is not obsolete but it's not common either. What is a jot? A tiny bit, a shred, a whit, a speck, a scintilla, a mite, a trace, a skoch, an inkling, a dollop. Smaller by far than a mere smidgeon. But in its root meaning, was a jot a measure of liquid, such as an ounce? or of weight, such as a gram? A measure of distance?  A measure of time: "I'll be with you in just a jot."

Professor Google tells me it's none of those things and that I am entirely off track. "Jot" is alphabetic; it translates the Greek "iota," the smallest letter -- no more than a single straight line, a minimal minim. And therefore Othello might just as well have said (the words are cognates), "Not an iota, not an iota." He might have said it, that is, if he hadn't spent his dearest action in the tented field engaging exclusively in broils and battles, but instead had studied at some North African classical academy.

In fact, Shakespeare either didn't know or didn't use the word "iota," which seems not to have entered English until a generation after he ceased putting quill to paper. On the other hand, Shakespeare was mighty fond of the word jot, which he employed at least twenty times (though never so notably as in Othello), always to denote a small quantity and frequently to appear as a partitive: "jot of promise," "jot of ceremony," "jot of color," "jot of pleasure," "jot of blood.'" Shakespeare's "jot" can even signify a moment in time: "No, faith, I'll not stay a jot longer." (His "jot" is always a noun, never the converted verb meaning "to write a few words quickly.")

Shakespeare undoubtedly knew the word "jot" from its famous and mysterious appearance in Matthew 5:18. Here's the familiar King James Version (1611): "For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." The phrasing is almost the same in the Geneva Bible of 1576 -- the translation that Shakespeare himself knew and used. "For truly I say unto you, Till heaven and earth perish, one jot or one tittle of the Law shall not escape, till all things be fulfilled."

I don't know what "all things" are and I certainly don't know what is meant by "fulfilled." But why should I, since Jesus's prophesy has long baffled trained professional theologians. But I do know that the pairing of "jot and tittle" has become proverbial.

What, then, is a "tittle." No, it's not a very small female breast. Nor is it a diminutive seabird, though it's not difficult to imagine a rocky south Atlantic island frequented by the "Lesser, or Little Tittle." In actual fact, it's a stroke of a pen -- and one that's even smaller than an iota. Specifically, it's the dot over the lower case "i" or lower case "j." Or, in an extended sense, any simple diacritical mark. 

Shakespeare used "tittle" just twice. The first was in Love's Labor's Lost in a passage in which Shakespeare makes game of affected language. Pompous Don Armado de Adriano compares little things (the woman he woos) to greater things (himself) "Shall I entreat thy love? I will. What shalt thou exchange for rags? robes; for tittles? titles; for thyself? me." What a difference a "t" makes! "Tittle" makes its second, almost inadvertent, appearance in The Winter's Tale as an element in the dismissive reduplicative "tittle-tattling." Both of Shakespeare's tittles acknowledge that the word is an inherently silly one. Is it accidental that a number of words that resemble tittle are frivolous or infantile: babble, toddle, tattle, prattle?   

"Tittle" smacks of triviality. It lacks heft. It would have been a literary disaster, a catastrophe of the first order, if Othello had responded to Iago not with "Not a jot, not a jot," but with "not a tittle, not a tittle." 

[October 29]  Otis Brown responds: "Dr. M.: you've forgotten the most famous Tittle of all: Yelberton Abraham. How could you?

[November 2]  Vivian de St. Vrain responds:

 

Our Visit to Beardstown, Illinois

We visited Beardstown, in southwestern Illinois, because it was the birthplace, in 1845, of one of Lynn's maternal great-grandmothers, Mary St. John DeHaven. Even though it is Lincoln country, we had no idea what to expect, the AAA entry being so scant, but we soon discovered that Beardstown is a place that had its moment of glory sometime in the nineteenth century, but which has allowed history to pass it by. While it's not entirely derelict, it's not even slightly prosperous -- nor has it achieved quaintness. The industry of note nowadays is the JBS meat-packing plant out on the Arenzville Road; most of its employees come from south of the border, which is why the only indication that Beardstown might someday be rejuvenated is the dozen or so new downtown taquerias and iglesias.

Our first stop in Beardstown was a decaying, rather pathetic 200-foot long peeling boardwalk along the sandy Illinois River, a waterway which in the years before the Civil War had been a thriving commercial thoroughfare. There we watched a solitary tug struggle to free a barge that had somehow run itself aground. Perhaps the boardwalk had once welcomed visitors and tourists, but during our stay the only spectator beside ourselves was a very frayed out-of-work fellow who arrived on a beaten-up bicycle, and who seemed entirely out of his depth when we asked if there was a place in Beardstown to purchase a cup of coffee. To me, he seemed addled; I suspected meth or opioids.

After gazing at the sluggish river for half an hour (remembering Abraham Lincoln's enthusiasm for river transport), we toured the few blocks of the old downtown, in which fewer storefronts were occupied than were vacant. We looked in at an antique store -- actually less "antique" than "junque" (unless a flashy bejewelled Elvis Presley doll was a revered artifact of a prior civilization). Lynn purchased an owl-decorated piece of blue porcelain for $5.00. We inquired of the proprietor, Mrs. White, if there were a coffee shop in Beardstown. Patricia White, we soon learned, was a recently retired public school music teacher and a lively lady knowledgeable about all things Beardstownian. I asked her about the intriguing storefront adjacent to hers, which proclaimed itself to be a Grand Opera House. I was skeptical that any sort of grandeur could be found in such dreary town, but I was wrong. Mrs. White generously offered us a tour of the old theater. She warned us that it was in deep disrepair but she said that she and others, led by the local chiropractor, were working diligently towards its restoration. So up a flight of dark stairs we went, and there, lo and behold, was revealed to us the picturesque ruins of what had once been a remarkable structure. Here's a photograph of the remains of its ornate frescoed ceiling and 20-foot-high windows:

The theatre had a well-proportioned stage and had once (before the balcony was pulled down) been able to seat several hundred people. In the littered backstage were the remnants of nineteenth-century traveling shows, including a large painted backdrop of Venetian gondolas, left behind by a company from St. Louis. But the building, though its bones were good, was a wreck: leaks in the roof had caused the ceiling to deteriorate. The auditorium itself had served as a storage area for the overflow merchandise of decades of store owners. It would take a dozen roll-offs and weeks of work just to remove the trash and find the floor. Nevertheless, the Grand Opera House offered us an insight into what Beardstown had been when it was a thriving community. I was so impressed by the theater that I decided to donate my bit to its reconstruction. I had determined on $100 until I noticed that Mrs. White had donned a red white and blue Trump 2020 face mask. And so arose a moral dilemma: I want to support the arts, and I would love to help return the Grand Opera House to its former glory. Opera and music should be beyond politics -- but yet I was deeply repelled by Mrs. White's Trumpism. So I split the difference and donated $60 to the cause. A sensible compromise to a vexing problem?? I don't know. But it's what I did. I wanted to ask Mrs. White what Donald Trump's ignorance, bigotry, authoritarian predilections and corrupt, vacant life had to offer to a cheerful retired teacher in a decaying midwestern town, but I saw no reason to provoke a controversy.  

Afterward, we found some lunch up the street at Sally's Bistro. The bistro did not live up to "bistro" expectations, and could more honestly be called Sally's Diner, but it did make a good BLT and almost-decent coffee. We did not try the "alligator bits" for which it is famous, even though Sally assured us that the bits were much better than the usual alligator tail. (Beardstown has an alligator farm but we didn't tour it.)

Mrs. White had also told us about the "old cemetery" so on a lark we went off to investigate. We wandered about, not expecting much, until we stumbled upon a gravestone which revealed that the late Henry Foster married the late Mary McKeever DeHaven. Lynn doesn't know precisely who these people are, but there are so many of her family names on the marker -- that of her grandfather, George Foster Massey, her uncle, McKeever Massey, her second cousin, Katherine DeHaven Milligan -- that they must  be long-departed members of her extended ancestry. Certainly cousins of some degree.

We googled Henry T. (for True) Foster and found that he was a pillar of the frontier community of Beardstown. He had immigrated from Maine; Mary from Philadelphia. We were gratified by this unexpected find. 

On the return trip from Beardstown to Jacksonville, we stopped at Griggsville, which, we were astonished to discover, is the "purple martin capitol of the nation" and the location of the world's largest purple martin skyscraper. Skeptical?  Here's the proof:

So altogether a most rewarding day.

 

Driftin'

Every once in a while, I experience something that I call a "cultural convergence" -- perhaps an event reported in a daily newspaper that closely resembles something on the very page of the novel that I happen to be reading. A cross-genre overlap, let us say.

Here's in example of such a coincidence that amused me much.  

Yesterday evening I watched the classic western The Magnificent Seven (1960) and this morning I read, once again, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. It's hard to believe but yes, there is a very brief moment where two such very distinct works brush against one another.  

Unlike TN, The Magnificent Seven is a violent spectacle that steers clear of humor, or subtle characterization or extensive dialogue. After the climactic concluding battle to preserve the Mexican village has been both lost and won, the two surviving gunmen share a moment before trotting off on their separate ways. Chris Adams (Yul Brynner) inquires of Vin Tanner (Steve McQueen) if he has a plan for what comes next. Laconic Vin, cowpoke and gunslinger, responds, "driftin'. 

In Twelfth Night, there's a similar question and a similar answer, but in a far different idiom. Antonio asks Sebastian, who has survived a shipwreck, about his plans. Sebastian's view of his future is essentially the same as Vin's, but there is none of that "ah shucks" minimalism in his reply. Instead, Sebastian responds, "My determinate voyage is mere extravagancy."  

[While Vin's one-word answer is clear as clear can be, Sebastian's "mere extravagancy" requires a bit of a gloss. Nowadays, "extravagancy" (usually "extravagance") signifies a "lack of restrain in purchasing luxury goods." Not so in 1600, when "extravagant" remained much closer to its root etymological inheritance. The word descends from L. vagare, "to wander." Extra-vagance therefore means something like "wander beyond." Here's a more familiar example of the word at work: when Roderigo characterizes Othello as an "extravagant and wheeling stranger," he does not criticize Othello for spending too many ducats on his fancy get-up. He means that he's a rootless and wandering non-native. (Wheeling? my dictionary glosses wheeling as "roving, wandering, drifting"). And also: "mere" did not then connote triviality; its meaning is closer to "pure." "Determinate" meant and still means "decided.")

Therefore Sebastian's sentence --"My determinate voyage is mere extravagancy" -- is directly equivalent to  Vin's "driftin''". Cultural convergence at its best.

It's just two ways of talkin'. 

I sometimes wonder about Shakespeare's intent here. Why did he bother to put such a difficult sentence in Sebastian's mouth? For purposes of characterization, certainly. But at the expense of clarity. Wouldn't it have been more economical, more transparent, for Sebastian to say something plain, such as "I don't have a plan, I'll just wander." It's certain that some percentage of Shakespeare's audience, perhaps most, will not grasp the meaning  of the sentence as written and will be left puzzled. Yet as he so often does, Shakespeare preferred eloquence to transparency. 

In my opinion, Shakespeare delighted in his own fluency.  And sometimes I think that Shakespeare wasn't just writing to be heard by his Globe or Blackfriars audience. He was writing to be read and studied --  although I doubt he could have imagined a future in which his sentences would be glossed with crowded inches of small-type footnotes.

It it possible that Shakespeare also had an inkling that, as Beethoven once put it, he was writing for "a latter age?"

Words of My Life: Bottom

"Bottom" is another of the many words that came into my life through the medium of baseball. As soon as I was able to walk and talk, I learned that an inning has both a "top" and a "bottom." "Bottom of the ninth" was an optimistic phrase because there was always the Ebbets Field hope that the Dodgers might come through with a game-winning rally. Later, when I discovered that there was more to human existence than baseball, the various and colorful meanings of "bottom" began to reveal themselves. For example, the posterior part of the human body, which I knew as the ass or the behind or the tuchas, was, I learned, called the "bottom" by people of sophistication. A euphemism?  A Britishism? 

Even later on, I discovered that bottom, signifying buttocks or butt was not the root meaning of the word but a metaphorical extension of its original sense. Old English botm, cognate with Latin fundus, meant land or farm or soil. This meaning of "bottom" is well-preserved in the phrase "bottom land" -- the level and fertile acres along the banks of a watercourse. Many English family names are consequently topographical surnames of ancient inhabitants of various river fronts -- such as Bottoms, Robottom, Higginbottom, Ramsbottom, Longbottom, Winterbottom, and Bottomley. Names that have nothing to do with either innings or asses.

The oddity that "bottom" can refer both to farmland and to the human butt can sometimes yield unconscious comedy. For example, in 1977, I was a guest at a wedding in the infelicitously named Kent village of Pett Bottom. I must hope that Pett is a variant of Pitt, a "hollow," rather than commonplace "pet" with a supernumerary "t".

These days, "bottom" is more likely to mean something like "the essence" -- as in such phrases "to get to the bottom of the matter"; or "the bottom of one's heart."

And then there's egregious Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, who does not disdain the mandatory pun: "This is to make an ass of me."

Shakespeare likes the word "bottom." Here's Malcolm's most memorable characterization of Macbeth.  

 

                          I grant him bloody,
Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,
Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin
That has a name: but there's no bottom, none,
In my voluptuousness: your wives, your daughters,
Your matrons and your maids, could not fill up
The cistern of my lust, and my desire
All continent impediments would o'erbear
That did oppose my will:

 

This "bottom" is not farmland or butt; it's the low point in a downward trajectory. This "bottom" is associated with "cistern" -- a receptacle for holding water.  Curiously, Shakespeare regularly uses the word in its relation to the water of oceans, most specifically the sea-bottom:  

 

            the slimy bottom of the deep.    (Richard III)

 

O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love! But it cannot be sounded; my affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal.  (As You Like It)

 

By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap,
To pluck bright honor from the pale-faced moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,
And pluck up drowned honor by the locks.  (I Henry IV)

 

As is the ooze and bottom of the sea. (Henry V)

 

Who ever yet could sound thy bottom? find
The ooze, to show what coast thy sluggish crare
Might easiliest harbour in?                                   (Cymbeline)

 

 

I suspect that Shakespeare would have savored the modern phrase, "bottom feeder."  But I doubt he would have understood, any more than I do, the names of the fifth and sixth quarks, which are top and bottom (exactly like an inning).

 

Other words of my life:  slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage. spatchcock, umpire, stopper.

Othello (1604), Nora Prentiss (1947), Date Night (2011)

Many years ago, in what sometimes seems like an earlier life, I taught Shakespeare courses to both young and "mature" students. When we reached Othello, halfway through the semester, I would, of course, point out that the play did not take the traditional form of tragedy-- of a great man or king gone awry as in the case of Macbeth or Richard III. Othello instead introduced a formula that was innovative for its time but which has become commonplace in ours. Othello is a domestic drama in which a marriage falls all to pieces. I liked to tell my captive audience, only slightly facetiously, that the whole of life is divided into two parts: the comic, which begins with birth and ends with marriage, and the tragic, which begins with marriage and proceeds to death. A statement which is a kind of shorthand, simplified version of a cliche of criticism. Like many such abbreviations, this formula contains a dollop of truth. Othello in fact begins with a marriage -- or more accurately a defiant elopement -- and comes to conclusion with Desdemona strangled in her bed and her husband the Moor a suicide. It's the sole play of Shakespeare's that follows the strict marriage-to-death path, although Romeo and Juliet is comic until the secret wedding but becomes tragic afterwards, while the wondrous Winter's Tale begins with Leontes and Hermione already married and pushes through some desperate circumstances only to come to a miraculous comic climax with the restoration of a woman presumed dead and a glorious second-generation wedding. Both RJ and WT sometimes seem like two different and opposite kinds of plays condensed into one -- and yet are all the more triumphant for being so.

These musings were precipitated by the film that we watched a couple of nights ago -- Nora Prentiss (1947), which Wikipedia characterizes as a film noir, but which is better thought of as two films in one -- a film that starts as an instance of domestic drama or "bourgeois realism" or even soap opera and doesn't become a murder mystery until two-thirds along the way. In a limited sense, it's not unlike Shakespeare's hybrids, but alas does not successfully yoke or blend its disparate plots. As a result, the last section of Nora Prentiss, I'm sorry to say, becomes not intriguing but unbelievable and ludicrous. It's an odd and interesting film, although not a good one, but it's worth watching for aficionados of TCM not only for its manipulation of genre expectations but also because it is one of a large group of films that are so very common and ordinary in twentieth-century America where such enormous value is attached to a happy and fulfilling marriage -- and to the disappointment that arises when the marriage comes a-cropper. In Nora Prentiss, a midlife couple with a pair of kids, who live in an orderly picket-fence house, ought to be living a happy life, but, by golly, both husband and wife are discontented and bored. They are afflicted with the whole package of suburban anxieties. It's Cheever-land or Updyke-land: demanding children and divorcing friends, the stultifying daily routine, the unsatisfying jobs, the dull obligatory social events, and especially the lack of sexual excitement which is signified in these Code-burdened movies by the gulf between the twin beds and the sterile head-to-toe sleepwear and also by that pathetic chaste kiss before husband and wife turn away from each other as they extinguish the cute matching bedside table lamps. Gosh, it's a scenario that is familiar from dozens and perhaps scores of postwar (and later) films. 

Melodramatic Nora Prentiss follows the fortunes of steady-Eddie Dr. Richard Talbot, enacted by Kent Smith, who meets nightclub chantoosie Nora, played by Anne Sheridan. Flirtation turns into an affair, and the affair evolves into true love or at least into genuine sexual passion. But all goes from bad to worse when Talbot, instead of seeking a divorce from his stern unlovely wife, concocts a dumb whopper of a plot that makes Friar Lawrence's harebrained sleeping-dram waking-up-in-the-tomb plan seem brilliant in comparison. Talbot fakes his own death and disappears -- causing the film to turn police-procedural. And then, through a series of hard-to-credit mischances and gimmicks, Talbot finds himself in his newly assumed fake guise indicted for murdering -- oh no yes indeed! -- his very own self. Nora Prentiss by this time has metamorphosed into a film that by rights should be renamed City of Naked Death or Shadow of Evil Night. Even so, the film might have been salvaged had not so much depended on the acting skill of Kent Smith, who is perfectly fine in the first part of the film, but incapable of managing the switch from reliable doc to nervous fugitive. It's not entirely his fault: the role puts too much pressure on the actor. I doubt whether such a transition could have been handled by Roscius or Burbage or Garrick or Sir Laurence Olivier himself.

Here is a picture of Ann Sheridan and Kent Smith. Sheridan wisely holds on to her hat; Smith's chapeau dominates the scene; very 1940s. 

Here's another still. I am in utter disagreement with Kent Smith's pencil mustache. It's a mistake. He wears it when he's a straight suburbanite and shaves it off when he goes underground -- an infranasal situation highly out of synch with the psychological trajectory of the film; by rights, he should have been clean-shaven when he was domestic and hirsute when he was a criminal.

 

 

Just to bring these ramblings to conclusion, I should add that the evening after we watched Nora Prentiss, we gambled on a newish HBO film called Date Night (2011) only to experience a moment of extreme cultural convergence. Once again, a suburban couple (this time Steve Carell and Tina Fey) are stuck in a boring suburban marriage --  same sheaf of symptoms as in Nora P. They jointly decide to liven things up and before push comes to shove, they find themselves in a big city world of traditional noir tropes: mistaken identity, guns and gangsters, police on the take, a corrupt mayor, deserted dark buildings, death threats. Date Night even flirts with old archetypes: in order to renew themselves, the couple must pass through an underworld (not Hades this time, but the criminal underworld) where Acheron is played by a lake in Manhattan's Central Park). It's not credible, of course, but then, it's not meant to be so.

 

 

No mustaches this time, I'm glad to say. But just like RJ and WT, two films in one.

 

Can We Hope for a Locative Renaissance?

Here on Walnut Street, we're trying to make more and better use of locatives -- words that have long been underemployed and undervalued. We think that the language (and therefore the world) would be richer and more commodious if others would join with us in this endeavor. But we're not evangelizing, heck no! We honor and respect each and every person's private and personal linguistic choices, locatively-speaking. 

Nor do we refer to the common adverbial locatives, such as homeward, downtown, underground, or nearby.  The locatives that we wish to revive and reinvigorate are the neglected -- even forsaken -- classics of locativity.

Everyone uses the locative where -- the point upon which you metaphorically stand --  but how many of us remember to employ the excellent and useful "to" form, whither, or the "from" form, whence.  It's true that whither and whence sound a trifle obsolescent, but with frequent use the flexible ear will soon accommodate. One might be tempted to say "wither goest thou" or "whence com'st thou", but with a little effort, "whither do you go" and "whence do you come" will sound perfectly natural, I'm sure.

Similarly, we regularly use the word here, but by golly, we have slighted hither (to here) and hence (from here).

Equally neglectful is the abandonment of thither and thence ("to there" and "from there"). Extraordinary useful words, relegated thoughtlessly to the rear of the locative line.

And then of course, there's yon, yond and yonder, all related varieties of "there" but further off than "there." At a distance. Shakespeare, as one would expect, is a most skillful deployer of yons. From Hamlet: "But look, the morn in russet mantle clad/ Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill."  From Julius Caesar. "Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;/ He thinks too much; such men are dangerous."  From Romeo and Juliet. "What lady's that/ Which doth enrich the hand of yonder knight?"

A yonnish locative that is not endangered and continues to thrive is the word beyond. Shakespeare's most remarkable and I daresay most beautiful use of "beyond" occurs in Cymbeline, when Innogen learns that her exiled lover Posthumus Leonatus has returned to England. She is impatient to meet him at Milford Haven; Innogen's speech that begins with the plaintive cry, "O, for a horse with wings" includes the most transcendent barrier-busting locative in the entire history of the English language. Her longing to see her lover is, she claims, "beyond beyond." A superlative locative, beyond anyone's imagination but Will's.  

Words of My Life: Boot

Is there another common English word that exhibits such varied meanings as "boot?" Or one that has shown such continual transformation during my brief years on the planet?

Like much of my early vocabulary, "boot" entered my life through the medium of radio baseball . In my mind's ear, I can hear the voice of Red Barber announcing that "umpire Babe Pinelli has just given the boot to Leo Durocher." "Given the boot" does not make the claim that Durocher was presented with footwear; it means that he was kicked out of the game as if with a metaphorically-booted foot.

Nor was it only obstreperous managers who were "booted." "There's a two-hopper to third, but Cox boots it" -- meaning that he bobbled it, even though the ball never touched his foot. In baseball, curiously, you can boot a ball with your hand, which is, logically speaking, as nonsensical as mis-gloving it with your foot. 

As everyone knows, a boot primarily protects the area from the shin down to the toes. But there's a second common meaning to "boot": "something extra," as in the phrase "to boot." "He's a great pitcher -- and a good hitter to boot." The shoe-ish meaning comes through old French from a Germanic source; the profit or use or something-extra meaning derives from an unrelated OE (Old English) word; moreover, in latter stages of its development "boot" has also been influenced by its phonological neighbors booty, and, I suspect, butt. 

In order to gain some historical perspective, let us consider the ways in which Shakespeare makes use of the word boot. "To boot" meaning "in addition" is employed frequently, as, for example, when Henry IV swears "by my scepter and my soul to boot," or when Macduff says to Malcolm that "I would not be the villain that thou think'st/ For the whole space that's in the tyrant's grasp/ And the rich east to boot." A less familiar use occurs in The Winter's Tale, when Hermione, accused of adultery, concedes that  "it shall scarce boot me/ To say 'not guilty.'" Her "boot" means that it will not be to her advantage or profit to assert her innocence. This signification can shade over into gain or even into a coin itself, as for example when Camillo passes money to Autolycus, saying,"hold thee, there's some boot." Contemplating his gain, Autolycus muses, "What an exchange had this been without boot! What a boot is here with this exchange." Just as boot is gain, so bootless means without gain or helpless, as when Henry V explains that he will be powerless to restrain a rampage: "We may as bootless spend our vain command/ Upon the enraged soldiers in their spoil."

Shakespeare gets some punning mileage out of the multiple meanings of "boot." Glendower boasts that "[T]hree times hath Henry Bolingbroke made head/ Against my power; thrice from the banks of Wye/ And sandy-bottom'd Severn have I sent him/ Bootless home and weather-beaten back. "Bootless" means helpless; but sardonic Hotspur, never noted for a sophisticated sense of humor, cannot resist the obvious pun: "Home without boots. And in foul weather too."

So a boot can be a shoe, an advantage, an addition, a reward, a help. But look what's happened to the poor helpless word in more recent times. "Boot Hill" is a cowboy frontier cemetery.  Across the waters, a "boot" is the trunk of an automobile. The infamous "Denver boot" is a wheel clamp that immobilizes a vehicle. In the army, a boot is a recruit or rookie who is sent to "boot camp."

But then, along came the computer, where one "boots" or restarts one's machine. This use, I'm told, originated with the phrase, to "pull oneself up by one's own bootstraps" -- i.e. perform a difficult task at one's own initiative, just as a computer starts itself. There's also the warmboot, which sounds little too much like the old torture device, the Spanish boot and which can also be called a softboot (but not by me).  

In Shakespeare's day, boot was not always distinguished from "booty" as in the case of the Archbishop of Canterbury's famous bees, which "like soldiers, armed in their stings,/ Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds,/ Which pillage they with merry march bring home." Booty as pillage survives to this day, but is, I think, obsolescent. Nowadays, booty is more likely to be used in the phrase "booty call" which means (and here I'm relying on the invaluable Urban Dictionary) a "telephone call made to request a sexual encounter." Who would ever have devised or imagined such an innovation?  Does this booty derive from "shake your booty," meaning to move your butt or bottom in a sexually suggestive way?  Not a meaning known to Shakespeare, or at least, not one that the Shakespeare concordance acknowledges.

 

Other words of my life:  slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage. spatchcock, umpire.

Nostalgia

The word "nostalgia" has a curious history. It was coined in the late 17th century by attaching Greek άλγος (algos - pain) to νόστος (nostos -homecoming). Originally, nostalgia carried a strongly negative signification: "intense homesickness" -- "the depressing symptoms...  that arise in persons when they are seized with a longing to return to their home and friends." Then, for reasons that are not on the record, sometime during the first part of the last century, the meaning of nostalgia shifted and became much more positive. It's now a good word: "a wistful yearning for the past." A useful word.

Nostalgia is a familiar phenomena that all can recognize: the savoring of a pleasant memory from earlier in our lives. It seems that nostalgia contains within it a bias toward or even a falsification of the past. It's implicit in nostalgia that things were better "back then." For example: I am a member of a Facebook group called My Flatbush House from Years Ago. Its contributors routinely idealize their childhoods. Reading their posts, you'd think that the Flatbush of our youth was if not the the classical Golden Age at least the Garden of Eden. "I loved my Brooklyn childhood." "I wouldn’t trade my childhood for anything." "I grew up in the 40s and 50s! We were so lucky to have known those days." "Much simpler times, more real and human-sized." "There was no fear, everybody felt safe; we played out in the streets, unsupervised, until it was suppertime." "We walked to and from school in every weather." "Going out meant playing games in the street." "I feel so blessed to have lived such a wonderful free life." "The fragrance of roses was everywhere in July (why don't roses have perfume anymore?)"

"Ou sont les neiges d'antan?"  "Those were the days, my friend,/ We thought they'd never end." "Rocky Top you'll always be/ Home sweet home to me."

Of course I also remember the good times, but I can't embrace such unalloyed, uncritical celebrations. Yes, I can savor some pleasant moments in my seventy-years-ago life. But I also recall that the 1950s was the era of "juvenile delinquents" and gang wars, back alley abortions, ethnic strife, "broken homes," heroin, segregation, overcrowded chaotic schools, imminent nuclear holocaust and "take cover" drills, McCarthyism, polio, the Korean War, Stalin, and Walter O'Malley.  

It's fascinating that the English language does not have a word for an antonym of nostalgia. One of my sources suggests "cynicism." But I'm not a cynic;  I'm an intermittent and realistic anti-nostalgist.   

And why, when I lie insomniac (as is my too-frequent custom), do I not savor the odor of those ever-perfumed Coney Island Avenue hybrid tea roses but instead am tormented by nightmares of fear, humiliation, awkwardness, embarrassment and loneliness. My childhood was pretty good one, thanks to my attentive parents. So why do I obsess about the bad times? Have I gone full curmudgeon? Or am I simply more honest than my cohort of Flatbush contemporaries?

In The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, Shakespeare explores nostalgia and its opposite. Two old guys, Shallow and Silence, reminisce. 

SHALLOW: I was once of Clement's Inn, where I think they will talk of mad Shallow yet.

SILENCE: You were called 'lusty Shallow" then, cousin...

SHALLOW: On that very same day did I fight with on Samson Stockfish, a fruiterer, behind Gray's Inn. Jesu, jesu, the mad days that I have spent. And to see how many of my old acquaintance are now dead.

SILENCE:  We shall all follow, cousin...

SHALLOW:  Death is certain. Is old Double of your town living yet?

SILENCE: Dead, sir.

SHALLOW: Jesu, jesu, dead. He drew a good bow; and dead. He shot a fine shot...  And is Jane Nightwork alive?...  Nay, she must be old; she cannot choose but be old; certain she's old, and had Robin Nightwork by old Nightwork before I came to Clement's Inn.

SILENCE:  That's fifty-five years since.

And then comes the correction, the anti-nostalgist.  

FALSTAFF:  Lord, lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying. This same starved justice hath done nothing but prate to me of the wildness of his youth, and the feats he hath done about Turnbull Street;  and every third word a lie.... He was the very genius of famine, yet lecherous as a monkey,... And now is this vice's dagger become a squire and talks as familiarly of John o' Gaunt as if he had been sworn brother to him, and I'll be sworn he never saw him but once in the tilt-yard, and then he burst his head for crowding among the marshal's men.

And on and on, at great amusing length.

Shallow and Silence indulge their nostalgia;  Falstaff sees thing differently, but whether he is a realist, a cynic or a curmudgeon is open to interpretation.

More Oxymora; Love's Labour's Lost

I'm detecting oxymorons in everything I read. Perhaps I'm even imagining them. Love's Labour's Lost is a "great feast of languages" and also a savory banquet of rhetorical figures. Here are some of the oxymorons (or "cross-couplers," as Puttenham called them) that I came upon in my latest re-reading of the play. Some require explanation.

"Civil war," not 'civil" as in the American Civil War but civil as in "civility" or good manners (like the "merry war" between Beatrice and Benedick). "Trencher-knight" because a trencher was generally a wooden dish, not suitable for knights -- and therefore a trencher-knight would be a low-born knight. "Living art," where the art is a portrait or a statue, and therefore not living and breathing. "Loose grace,' where "loose" means worldly rather than spiritual. "Profound simplicity." "Evil angel." "Dainty Bacchus," because Bacchus was notably disorderly. "Sweet misprision," because misprision is a dereliction of duty and therefore not sweet but sour or bitter. "Rational hind," whether hind refers to an animal or to a person of exceedingly small intellectual gifts. In addition, two near-oxymora: "merry days of desolation," "as swift as lead."  

These figures of speech are not as obvious as those in Romeo and Juliet, but they allow us to observe Shakespeare at work, experimenting with the ingredients of language, just as he was hitting his stride.

Shakespeare at Work: the Oxymoron

The oxymoron, a figure of speech in which there is a sharp contradiction between modifier and noun, has become a boon to humorists: "business ethics," "military intelligence," "pretty ugly," "jumbo shrimp," "Christian Science," "Utah Jazz."  But it's a figure that has a serious side as well. The oxymoron expresses very well the contradictions inherent in literary and also human life.  Life is a mingled yarn, is it not?  Both fair and foul, sometimes in the same moment; sweet sorrow. Because Shakespeare tried to convey the complexity of things, he employed oxymorons  throughout his career -- in simple straightforward formulas at the early plays, but in his maturity in innovative and sometimes startlingly beautiful ways.

The oxymoron has a long pedigree. It may go as far back as to a classical trope called the adynaton, or collection of impossibilities. There is a treasure-trove of oxymora in Alain of Lisle's thirteenth-century poem (or, more exactly, prosimetron) De Planctu Naturae in which "amor" is described as "pax odio, fraudique fides, spes juncta timor... mistus cum ratione furor,/ Naufragium dulce, pondus leve (peace in hatred, faith in fraud, hope joined to fear, madness mixed with reason, sweet shipwreck, light heaviness); there is a similar passage, from the same century, in Guillaime de Lorris extremely popular Romaunt of the Rose that begins "Love is a hateful peace and loving hate."

The oxymoron was given new life and vitality by Petrarch, whose sufferings for young Laura famously caused him to freeze in summer and burn in winter. Many sonneteers, continental and English, were indebted to Petrarch, among them Thomas Watson, a poet who flourished in the years of Shakespeare's adolescence. One of Watson's poems, which contained the lines "Love is a sour delight, a sugared grief/ A living death, and ever-dying life" lay behind young Romeo's modish and easily parodied oxymoron-rich rhetoric: "O brawling love, o loving hate,/ O heavy lightness, serious vanity,/ Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,/ Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health.... " Romeo was so besotted by his own rhetoric that Juliet couldn't resist a joke at his expense: "You kiss by the book." Romeo in 1595 owes a lot to Will in 1580.

Shakespeare knew that Romeo indulged too much of a good thing. Half a decade later, in All's Well That Ends Well, Helena imagined her perjured promiscuous lover Bertram at the French court dancing attendance on the ladies in a series of tired oxymora: "his humble ambition, proud humility,/ His jarring concord, and his discord dulcet,/ His faith, his sweet disaster."  In these lines, Helana, and Shakespeare as well, repudiated fashionable oxymoronic couplings. On the other hand, it is not love but hatred and anger that give rise to Timon's oxymorons. For him, the loathed Athenians, those "smiling smooth detested parasites, are "courteous destroyers, affable wolves, meek bears."  

In Hamlet, Claudius's insincere but brilliantly accomplished oxymorons camouflage his sin. He has

             as 'twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious, and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole

taken Gertrude as his wife. The pairing of "auspicious" (the root meaning of which is looking to the heavens to prognosticate by the flight of birds) with "dropping" is especially wonderful.

Claudius's "delight and dole" were anticipated by Richard II's rhetorical theatricality upon his return to England:

As a long-parted mother with her child
Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting,
So, weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth.

And there's the "wholesome iniquity" of the bawdy house in Pericles -- a play in which calm comes in the form of "litigious peace."

In King Lear, a play about, among other subjects  a "precious unprized" daughter, there is a submerged but stunning oxymoron when (in Edgar's words) Gloucester is at last released from his suffering: "his flaw'd heart.../ 'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,/ Burst smilingly." "Burst smilingly" is a phrase which the younger Shakespeare could not reach; nor could any other poet before or since.

"Bisson Conspectuities"

"Bisson conspectuities" is one of my all-time favorite Shakespearean oxymorons. Although it's not as transparent as, say, "hot ice" or "living death," it's much more quirky and colorful. "Bisson conspectuities" appears in Coriolanus in one of the scenes in which Menenius banters with the Roman crowd. They attack and he parries by enumerating his own strengths and weaknesses. He concludes with an insult that flaunts his patrician education: "What harm can your bisson conspectuities glean out of this character?" (In this case, a "character" is a summary statement of a person's habits or nature, a "characterization".)

The odd word "conspectuities" is an invention of Shakespeare's. He derived it from the participial form of the Latin verb "conspicio" -- to observe, gaze, or watch. It's a nonce word, a hapax legomenon; unlike some of Shakespeare's more inspired coinages, conspectuities never domesticated into English -- the OED lists only this sole appearance. "Bisson," on the other hand, which means "blind," was not new to the language but was in fact an ancient word of Germanic origin -- and already obsolescent in 1608, although the venerable proverb "the bysom ledys the blynde" might still have been current in the provinces. In Hamlet, the deliberately archaizing First Player uses the expression "bisson rheum" for "blinding tears." 

"Bisson conspectuities" means "blind sight" or "blear vision." It's an especially striking oxymoron because its component parts are drawn from opposite ends of the word hoard -- old and new, plain and polysyllabic, Germanic and Latin, rustic and citified.

But there's a complication. The word "bisson" doesn't actually appear in the Folio; there it is "beesome." "Beesome, usually spelled besom, meant and still means, "broom." But in the context of Coriolanus, broom is meaningless; and so, beginning  with Lewis Theobald in the 1720s, editors have uniformly substituted "bisson" -- an inspired conjecture but still a guess. It's possible that Shakespeare wrote "bisson" and a scrivener or printer incorrectly read 'beesome" -- but perhaps not. An oxymoron of transcendent genius might be merely an illusion -- a creation not of Shakespeare but of editorial tradition.

"Bisson conspectuities" puts quite a burden on members of the Blackfriar's audience. It's hard to believe that Shakespeare thought his first hearers would grasp the phrase's meaning on the fly. It's easy for us to understand it now, four hundred years later, with a treasury of annotations at the foot of every page. Perhaps Shakespeare didn't care if the audience comprehended? Is it possible that he was writing just for his own delight, for his pleasure in words? For readers rather than playgoers? Or perhaps he had already divined that he was writing for enthusiasts and scholars of a latter age.

Sir Smile

Sir Smile is a "character," in a way of speaking, in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. He's one the play's most fully-realized figures, even though he says no words, doesn't appear on stage, and exists nowhere but in King Leontes' diseased, paranoid fantasy life-- and then only for an evanescent second. Truth to tell, Sir Smile also appears to be an emanation from a dark corner of Shakespeare's own individual imagination. 

 

When does Sir Smile make his momentary appearance?  Leontes has gone off the deep end. Without the least shred of evidence, he generates the extremely destructive fantasy that his wife Hermione has been a-bed with his best friend and fellow king, Polixenes. He's in a rage, so much so that in the course of a stunning soliloquy, he busts right through the inviolable fourth wall and addresses himself directly to the men in the audience. He looks them right in the eye. "There have been," he laments, "cuckolds ere now"

And many a man there is, even at this present,
Now while I speak this, holds his wife by the arm,
That little thinks she has been sluiced in's absence
And his pond fish'd by his next neighbor, by
Sir Smile, his neighbor.

 

Leontes' soliloquy is "to the moment." "This is not make-believe. Look to your left and right, guys -- while you're clutching your wife's elbow, enjoying the play, that sly impudent fellow standing there, Sir Smile, has been fishing in your pond, ploughing your field, sleeping in your bed. It happens to everyone. Men -- we're all victims, all of us. We're drowning in sea of betrayal. You can't trust your neighbor, you can't trust anyone. And worse -- the seducers, the enemy, don't just diddle your wife; they triumph, they grin, they fleer. They amuse themselves at your suffering. Every one of them, sitting or standing in this theatre, is now or will be a such a person."

 

Sir Smile embodies Leontes' deepest fears. He distills humiliation and jealousy into a figure who is half nightmare and half allegory. In psychological terms, he's Leontes' doppelganger or double.

 

But why does Shakespeare call him Sir Smile? Why not Lord Lewd or Viscount Vice?

 

The honorific, the "Sir" part, is easy. Shakespeare regularly employs the word almost as a nickname. Sometimes his "sir" can sometimes be affectionate -- Leontes himself calls his son Mamillius,"sir page." Similarly, Lucius is "sir boy" to Titus. There's even a "Sir King" in Cymbeline. "Sir" can also be hostile: "sir knave." And sometime it's neutral; timid Viola would rather "go with sir priest than sir knight."  Sir-ness becomes more meaningful when its use is exemplary or abstract: "Sir Valor" in Troilus and Cressida; "Sir Prudence" in The Tempest; "Sir Oracle" in The Merchant of Venice. The Sir in Sir Smile has an instructive history.

 

But why is he a smiler?  Why does Shakespeare offer us a profligate or a roue who smiles as he goes about his amorous business?  To followers of Shakespeare, there's a ready answer. It's well known that false and hypocritical smiles transfix the Shakespearean imagination. The locus for this is Hamlet, where Denmark's prince is beside himself, furious at what he has seen in the face of Claudius, who is a

 

    villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables! Meet it is I set it down
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.

 

Smiling and villainy merge inextricably. Exactly as in the case of Leontes' imaginary neighbor, there's evil lurking beneath Claudius' smiley face. When Hamlet writes in his "table" -- we would say "tablet" --that "one may smile and be a villain," his characterization has the force of revelation or of a proverb or gnomic utterance.

 

But it's not only Claudius. The smile in "Sir Smile" emerges from a Shakespearean underworld. There's Richard of Gloucester, an unequalled villain, who can not only "cry 'Content' to that which grieves my heart,/ And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,/ And frame my face to all occasions" but who can also, most pertinently, "smile, and murder whiles I smile." And then there are the "smiling smooth, detested parasites" of Timon of Athens; the "villain with a smiling cheek" and the "smiling rogues" of The Merchant of Venice; "the smiling pick-thanks" --sycophants or flatterers -- of The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth as well as the assassins whom Calpurnia dreams "came smiling" to bathe their hands in Caesar's blood. Shakespeare's smiles are often linked to danger: Iago of Cassio; "Ay, smile upon her, do." Kent, in King Lear is enraged by condescending smiling Oswald: "A plague upon your epileptic visage! Smoile you my speeches, an I were a fool?"

 

Hence loathsome "Sir Smile." 

 

Fortunately, even for Shakespeare there are redeeming moments when when a smile is still a smile. Touchstone (in As You Like It) is in love. He remembers kissing his beloved's batler, "and the cow's dugs that her pretty chapt hands had milk'd; and remember[s}  the wooing of a peascod instead of her; from whom I took two cods, and giving her them again, said with weeping tears 'Wear these for my sake.'" The name of Touchstone's lovely rural mistress is "Jane Smile." No "sirs" in this Smile family, no sirree!

Petruchio and Othello?

It's an unlikely pairing -- what possible connection could there be between Petruchio, a creature of farce, and Othello, distinguished general and tragic victim of the green monster. Yet there is a surprising point of contact -- two similar (but very different) reminiscences. It's not usual for Shakespeare's characters to have a "backstory," but both P and O attempt one.

Petruchio brags that a shrew can't scare him, because he's been there before. "Think you a little din can daunt mine ears?" 

He riffs on the word "din." He's inured to noise, he claims -- and how he came to be so adds a new and improbable dimension to his character.

Have I not in my time heard lions roar?
Have I not heard the sea puff'd up with winds
Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat?
Have I not heard great ordnance in the field,
And heaven's artillery thunder in the skies?
Have I not in a pitched battle heard
Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets' clang?

I, for one, don't believe a word that Petruchio utters and I doubt whether Shakespeare expects us to do so. It's all bluster, the words of an accomplished bullshitter. Petruchio is a youthful fortune-hunter, full of bravado and effrontery to be sure, but except in this passage, he lacks an adventurous past or a military history. When did he hear lions roar?  While on a Roads Scholar tour of Scythia or central Africa? And where was the sea like an "angry boar?" Where was the "great ordnance" and "loud alarum?" More likely at Saturday afternoon serials than in the tented field. 

Othello's story, on the other hand, though more extravagant and fantastic, is grandly persuasive. Here's a piece of it: 

      I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field
Of hair-breadth scapes i' the imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
And portance in my travels' history:
Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven
It was my hint to speak,—such was the process;
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.

Othello veers into the mythological yet his story comports with what we otherwise know of him.  

Petruchio's tale is an instance of "just-in-time" characterization. Shakespeare needs to display Petruchio's bravery in the face of a scolding woman -- so he produces a soldiership story. It doesn't accord with Petruchio's history, but it doesn't need to, because it serves an immediate necessary dramatic function. Othello's speech is part and parcel; Petruchio's is a loose end.

And the language! The first passage, in early The Taming of the Shrew, is perfunctory; the second, in the mature tragedy, is simply magnificent. Anyone looking for evidence of Shakespeare's progress of a poet could do worse than compare these two passages.

Blood and Lust

There are so many overlaps between Richard III (1593) and Macbeth (1606) that it sometimes seems as though Shakespeare pillaged and reformed the earlier play when he composed the later. Both plays feature cynical upward strivers ("hellhounds," the playwright calls them both) who risk damnation to murder their way to the throne, and then lose their kingdoms in battle and are succeeded by spotless young heirs. Both Richard of Gloucester and Macbeth kill innocent children and both are haunted by the ghosts of those they have murdered.

Yet the two plays are very different. Macbeth is a tidy economical play (Shakespeare's second shortest), while Richard III (his second longest) is sprawling and repetitious, sometimes even bewildering, stuffed to the gills with incident and declamation. Moreover, Richard III lacks witches, moving forests, young Malcolm, Macduff's mysterious birth, and above all, ambitious Lady Macbeth. While Richard is famously amusing, Macbeth hasn't the slightest sense of humor even though he can be unconsciously ironic. 

When similar circumstances arise, as they must, it becomes obvious that the rhetorical strategies of Richard III are rudimentary compared to the richer and more satisfying language of Macbeth.

Here is one passage in the earlier play that has an echo or correspondence in the later. Richard instructs a follower to slander King Edward ("luxury" means "lust")"

          urge his (i.e. Edward's) hateful luxury,
And bestial appetite in change of lust;
Which stretch'd unto their servants, daughters, wives,
Even where his raging eye or savage heart,
Without control, listed to make a prey.

In Macbeth, Malcolm slanders himself.

                 There's no bottom, none,
In my voluptuousness. Your wives, your daughters,
Your matrons and your maids, could not fill up
The cistern of my lust, and my desire
All continent impediments would o'erbear
That did oppose my will.

Unbounded lust is the subject of both speeches - "servants, daughters, wives," expands into the even more inclusive wives, daughters, matrons, and maids. Richard's statement is strong, its power strengthened by the litany of allusions to the uncivil wild: "bestial," "raging," "savage," "prey." Macbeth's is considerably more powerful, primarily because of the extended metaphor in which lust is conceived as some sort of fluid. Many an acre foot of lust could be contained in a "cistern" without a "bottom."  Yet in fact a bottomless cistern would impound only a portion of Malcolm's sexual gusher which, it seems, is many times more abundant than a single cisternfull; it's a deluge that "continent impediments" such as embankments or dikes or dams cannot restrain. It's a tsunami.

A second correspondence occurs when Richard engages in a moment of self-evaluation. "But I am in/ So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin;/ Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye." Macbeth's improvement: "I am in blood/ Stepped in so far, that should I wade no more/ Returning were as tedious as go o'er." Blood in both, to be sure, but there are improvements. In the earlier passage, the key terms are sin and pity, abstractions which are rooted in the antecedent allegorical drama. "Sin" becomes a personage: "sin will pluck on sin." And pity or perhaps Pity, is also vivified through the use of the modifier "tear-falling." But these harkings back to allegory hint at the less abstract and more imaginative figure adumbrated in the phrase "so far in blood." It would be more ordinary and idiomatic to say not "stepped in so far" but "stepped in so deep." Unless, of course, the playwright had an idea lurking in the recesses of his brain which he didn't quite articulate. Ten years later, Richard's puddle became Macbeth's river or lake or even ocean, deep enough that it required the usurper king to "wade" in it. Shakespeare pursues the metaphor to its completion: "should I wade no more/ Returning were as tedious as go o'er" -- a figure which makes it clear that Macbeth is overshoes, knee deep -- or even hip deep --  in a nightmare swamp of his own making, There's no side channel, no bridge, no way out.

So apprentice "sin" and "pity" are superseded by masterly "cistern" and "blood" and "wade." 

It's not by accident that Macbeth is so deeply unsettling.

Innogen

In Cymbeline (1611?), Shakespeare, still innovating even at the end of his career, deepens the character of Innogen by supplying her with an unusual psychological trait. He presents her to us as an escapist or fantasist who leaps to imagine herself a different person in a different world. Here's Innogen early in the play, when she realizes that her cross-class marriage to Postumus (she's a princess, he's a poor but worthy gentleman) is at risk: "Would I were/ A neatherd's daughter, and my Leonatus/ Our neighbor shepherd's son." She fantasizes herself surrendering her nobility to become a peasant. A few moments later, she learns that her lover Leonatus and his rival the clotpoll Cloten have been in a sword fight and that Cloten has retreated. Innogen's reaction: "I would they were in Afric both together/ Myself by with a needle, that I might prick/ The goer-back". Why Africa? Because, among other reasons, it is far from the British court where Innogen's activities are heavily restricted. So in two short speeches Innogen has expressed willingness to being transformed in both class and geography. Shortly afterward, Innogen describes (in another "would that" imagining) how she would have stared at the retreating ship which takes Postumus into exile: "I would have broke mine eye-strings, cracked them,/ To look upon him till the dimunition/ Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle." Indifferent to physical pain, she now imagines herself transcending not only class and space, but also the limitations of her own body.

It was no accident that Shakespeare gave Innogen such freedom to re-invent herself, because in the scenes that follow, she will undergo a series of radical transformations -- from princess to a "franklin's wife," into a boy cooking fancy food for three cave-dwelling mountain-men, and then a dutiful page to the general of the invading Roman army, all the while avoiding betrayal, attempted rape and apparent poisoning. It's a lot for Innogen to deal with, but Shakespeare knew exactly what he was doing when he started her off with an imagination equal to the task. 

Susan P. (1937-38)

This entry is written at the specific instruction of my daughter, who says, "your grandchildren will want to know about your birth. It's their history too." The following paragraphs are for them and for their descendants.

My older sister, Susan, died of pneumonia at the age of nine months on March 15, 1938. If she had lived, I wouldn't exist, nor would my ten descendants, and no one would notice.

I was born on March 11, 1939, just one year minus four days after Susan died. It seems obvious that I was purposely conceived as a substitute for the dead child -- and it therefore follows that I was delivered into a disrupted, stressed family. Was I to be treasured as a compensation for past grief or to be resented as an imperfect interloper? Or both, simultaneously? To raise the ante, it is also a fact that during that fatal March of 1938 when Susan lay dying, my older brother Eugene, then just shy of three years of age, was gravely ill of the same disease that killed his younger sister, and that although he was at death's door, he managed to pull through.

So let us consider the situation of my parents, Manny and Lil, in June of 1938, the month of my conception. Poor Susan lay a-mouldering in her tiny grave for just three months. The Great Depression was still going strong and Hitler's Nuremberg Laws had been in force since 1935. Father Coughlin, celebrity Jew-hater, was agitating thirty million American radio listeners a week. Kristallnacht was just five months away and most everyone knew that war was imminent. Residing on East 9th Street in Flatbush were my grief-stricken young parents, who had helplessly watched one child die and had come within a hairbreadth of losing another. We must imagine them reeling, tearful, clinging to one another, dealing as best they might with heartbreaking anxiety and pain. Yet despite public and personal disasters, they made the courageous choice to throw the dice again, and out of their anguish to bring forth another child -- and to run the real risk, in those pre-antibiotic days, of offering still another sacrifice to pneumonia or some other dread incurable illness.

If my parents were still alive, I'd congratulate them, celebrate them, not because their resilience produced me, but because to beget a substitute child in chaotic, dangerous 1938 seems to me, now, looking back from the perspective of 2020, to be an act of unfathomable courage.

Or so I would like to think. It's also possible that I'm here not because of their heroism but because of a failure of contraception. I'll never know. I didn't ask; they never said, and the facts are unrecoverable. Lil and Manny wouldn't dream of speaking aloud about anything so intimate as sex or reproduction, certainly not with their children and, who knows, perhaps not even with one another. In that regard, they were typical of their generation. Personal matters were kept close to the vest. 

When Lil was five months pregnant, Hitler annexed the Sudetenland. Exactly three weeks before I landed on this planet, 20,000 Nazi supporters rallied, complete with Fascist salutes, at the old Madison Square Garden on 49th Street. Four days after I arrived, on the anniversary --the yahrzeit -- of the death of little Susan, while my mother was regaining her strength in Manhattan's Park East hospital on East 83rd Street, German tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. For Lil, for Manny, personal and public crises intersected. Nazis foreign and domestic were at the gates, and inside the hospital, my mother was still mourning the loss of the little girl whom my Uncle Dan, my mother's brother, remembered as an "exceptionally beautiful child." And lying beside Lil in her bed was the newborn, who was welcomed with joy, I'm sure, but with ambivalence also. Not an eternally glowing-in-memory girl child but me --an undistinguished chap, to put it in the most favorable light. Not "trailing clouds of glory" but instead enveloped in a fog of danger and possibly regret.

My parents, as I have said, kept their emotions tightly buttoned, so while Susan was not mourned or even mentioned within the family, she was never forgotten. In fact, throughout my childhood she remained a mysterious ghostly presence. In my parents' bedroom was a simple display -- a child-size wood-and-wicker chair and above it, on the wall, a gold-framed picture of a very pretty infant. The shrine fascinated me, and I would sneak into my parent's bedroom to study it. Sneak? Yes, because their bedroom was a consecrated place not to be defiled by Eugene or Jonathan or me. Off limits. It was the sin of all childhood sins to violate the taboo and cross into the forbidden zone. My mother made an unholy fuss about this rule. "You are not to go into our bedroom. Ever." Which I did, regularly, when no one was looking --- but it felt like a midnight intrusion into a deep dark country graveyard. Very creepy. Who is that infant in the picture? And why is she not allowed to rest in peace? I knew better than to ask.

I never thought, then, to wonder how Manny and Lil, contemplating the gilded idol morn and eve, could fail to compare their frozen-in-time lost infant to her scruffy successor? Of course I was aware that my "difficult" mother was a deeply troubled woman. But never, trust me, did I have the least glimmer that the shade of the dead infant haunted our family -- and myself in particular. No child, certainly not me, would have been so insightful. It's transparent now, but it was anything but obvious then. Nor could anyone possibly have predicted that there was to be an area of study within the discipline of psychology called "The Replacement Child Syndrome" (RCS). And that I was unequivocally a textbook case of such.  

RCS lay dormant. Forty years later, and forty years ago, when I was in midlife, not having thought for decades about my dead sister or her shrine or my long-departed parents, I experienced something of a revelation. It came about indirectly, but dramatically.

I was teaching classes on Shakespeare's plays. and I found myself paying much more heed to Romeo and Juliet than that immature early tragedy warrants. I was especially intrigued by Shakespeare's invention of the character of young Juliet -- which is far more subtle than is necessary for the plot. With Juliet, Shakespeare attempted something utterly unprecedented in any previous work of literature. He cleverly situated his young heroine in a complicated family in which Juliet had, in effect, two mothers -- a birth mother, Capulet wife, who is cold, distant and aloof, and a metaphorical and therefore real mother, Nurse Angelica, who is undisciplined but sensual and sexual. The two mothers, carefully differentiated, precipitate or echo or explain the conflict within Juliet between propriety and passion. One mother embraces and promulgates Verona's rigid mores, while the other is impulsive, emotional, and anarchic. In addition -- and now it all was starting to become extremely personal for me -- Shakespeare provided Juliet with a backstory (unusual because his characters rarely have prior histories). It comes to light that the Nurse's own natural daughter had died in infancy, that the bereaved mother was engaged to suckle Juliet -- and that Angelica has been Juliet's surrogate mother and companion for almost fourteen years. So Juliet is, for the Nurse, clearly and obviously a replacement child. How curiously relevant! How provocative!

I then remembered that William Shakespeare himself was such a child. According to the Trinity Church records, John and Mary Shakespeare had suffered two tragedies before April 23, 1564 when William was born. Their first child, a daughter named Joan, had been baptized four years earlier, in 1560, but lived only for two months. A second daughter, Margaret, was baptized in 1562 and lived for just under one year. A full year! and then the grave! How horrible for all concerned! Young Will therefore entered the world as the boy child who replaced not one but two older sisters. Even in an age of staggering infant mortality, two such premature deaths must surely have weighed on both John and Mary and on William himself. Is it an accident that Juliet is the only certified replacement child in early modern English literature (at least, the only one that I can recall at this moment)?

Mulling these matters, I soon discovered that I had failed to register some additional facts about the Capulet family that by rights ought to have set my heart all aflutter. Listen to the Nurse nattering on about her surrogate daughter Juliet.

Even or odd, of all days in the year,

Come Lamass Eve at night shall she be fourteen,.

Susan and she -- God rest all Christian souls--

Were of an age.  Well, Susan is with God.

She was too good for me.

How could I have missed it?  Right at the heart of the Capulet family dynamics, and therefore at the heart of the play, is not just a dead infant and a dead daughter, but a dead Susan.  

I have to say that this discovery put my brain into quite an epiphanic tizzy. How could I not have recognized the parallels between the Capulet family and my own?  And also, given my near-compulsive interest in the bonds and affiliations among Capulet wife and Nurse Angelica and Juliet -- how could my conscious mind have ignored information that had so vexed my unconscious?  

Alerted by this 1595 play to my own personal being, I set out to learn about the Replacement Child Syndrome (RCS) in what is charitably called the "literature" of psychoanalysis. While almost everything I read was either obtuse or so encrusted with obscurantist jargon as to be indecipherable, it was not hard to distill the gist. According to the experts, a replacement is always vulnerable and at hazard, especially so if the deceased infant has not been properly mourned, or-- as they say -- if there has not been "closure." Such a lad or lass goes through childhood constantly judged to be inferior to the idealized dead child. At worst, the love that is owed to the living child may be withdrawn and the replacement resented --  less loved, or even unloved; tolerated but undervalued.

Had she lived, the dead girl, let us call her Susan, of infinite and golden potential, would certainly have grown up to be an exceedingly dutiful daughter as well as a concert cellist and a world-class figure-skater who when just two years out of Yale would have created a state-of-the-art gynecological clinic in an underserved village in Moldova. The other, the replacement -- me -- bawls and pukes, bites a neighbor child on the cheek, throws a colossal shitfit over a missing puzzle piece, shatters an heirloom lamp, steals comic books from the local candy store, wastes weeks moping in his bedroom, totals the DeSoto, and fails trigonometry. No wonder he's a disappointment.

Well, maybe I'm laying it on with a trowel, but that's the general idea. 

Now (this is still forty years ago) reconstituted as a Syndrome, I entered into my "poor poor pitiful me" period. I wasted kilowatts of energy and eons of precious time conceptualizing myself as a case of "wrongful birth." I shifted the blame for all my emotional foibles onto my parents, especially, to be honest, onto my mother. Right at her doorstep I laid low self-esteem, intermittent depression, fear of success, disabling shyness and even (this was a bit of stretch) procrastination. But it didn't wash and it didn't last. I'm ashamed and embarrassed that I allowed myself to attribute my personal problems to my willing but helpless mother. Not that there wasn't a smidgeon of truth to the RCS analysis. Freud says that "a man who has won the love of his mother is always a hero in his own eyes"; well, that kind of heroism wasn't going to be my lot. Of course I would have preferred to have enjoyed intimacy with a smiling supportive mother. Not what happened. But it was selfish and wrong of me to dwell on slights which were trivial compared to the traumas undergone by my parents.They, not me, were and are the heroes of this story.

The bedrock is that the RCS, though real, was only of middling significance to me. It was devastating for Juliet, because it led directly to her suicide, and it may have served as a spur to Shakespeare, who became Shakespeare and, incidentally, fathered a daughter named Susannah. For me -- well, it was it only important for the moment. I was a wounded child -- no, not wounded, scratched --but not a disabled one. I was healthy enough to pursue if not a distinguished, certainly a respectable career, to become a reliable father, to meet my obligations to my extended family and community and to form a long-lasting marriage -- and when that first marriage was cut short by disease and death, to achieve in old age a second mature and satisfying relationship. My parents must have done a great deal right, for I became what my father used to praise, without a shred of irony, as a "proper, tax-paying citizen." At this point in my octogenarian life, there's no room for that old self-pitying me; instead, there's great admiration and regard for both Lil and Manny, who endured. And who, in the successes of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, continue to thrive and prosper.  

An addendum: in the psychological "literature", I found no mention, neither jot nor tittle, of the family configuration in which a male child replaces a female. No doubt such situations have by now been thoroughly researched by trained analysts, but not back then, when such a discussion might have been useful to me. The case of Juliet, where one girl replaces another, has been explored, but not Shakespeare's situation, or mine. I wonder sometimes whether the case of a boy succeeding a girl might lead to gender confusion, or as they now say, "fluidity" (if, for example, the parents unconsciously favor female traits in their son). I don't mean sexual practice, because I myself have never been (or wanted to be) anything other than a vanilla heterosexual. But I'm not even slightly macho; I am strongly domestic, comfortable with roles that have been traditionally reserved for women. I'm a gatherer, not a hunter; not the kind of person who goes to the fights with the guys or plays rugby and eventually, shunning the entrapment of wife or family, rides off on his horse into the sunset. I am much more likely to clean the bathroom, weed the garden, make some bad rhymes, play casino with the grandkids, and whip up a beef stew for dinner. 

Another addendum: I always wondered why Lil and Manny decided to give me an awkward obscure Biblical name. They had no interest in anything remotely smacking of religion. So why choose the name of one of Job's false comforters?  What were they thinking?  During my pitiful period, I imagined that they chose the name because they were disappointed with me. We can't name him Susan, said their joint unconscious, so let's give him an ugly name the diminutive of which is female. That was my theory, but now I have another idea. Perhaps, in March of 1939, to resurrect an obscure biblical name was to give the middle finger to Hitler. If so, it was an act of defiance. I hope I'm right.

And finally: my younger brother Jonathan, who was as equally improbable a replacement as I, was born in July of 1942, seven month after the Day of Infamy. He too entered in troubling times. Jon was an extremely handsome youth, regularly gushed over by friends and family -- and slightly envied by me. One of his shaping childhood experiences is of my mother holding his head in her hands and saying, "You would have made a very beautiful girl."

Jon too is a gatherer rather than a hunter, and when I'm in the kitchen slicing the potatoes and carrots for a big pot of beef stew, it's his excellent recipe that I follow.

"Vaulting Variable Ramps"

Let me guess that a modern reader coming upon Shakespeare's euphonious phrase "vaulting variable ramps" would be baffled as to its sense. Just WS being willfully obscure, one might complain. But it's not so; it's just that the language keeps on changing, making things difficult for audiences and readers.

The most obvious meaning  of "vaulting various ramps" -- hurdling a miscellaneous series of inclined planes, as in a steeplechase -- won't fly. "Ramps" takes us down a wrong path, because its modern meaning (a wood or concrete construction leading from one level to another) was unknown in 1611. It didn't enter the English language until 1778 -- as a borrowing from French rampe. (The entrance to a highway, as in "take the ramp on the right" is an Americanism dating only to the 1950s.)

A "ramp" is also a vegetable. It's an uncultivated, wild member of the onion family lately celebrated by fad foodies (or food faddies) as a great delicacy. But why Shakespeare would want someone to hurdle an individual ramp or even a field of ramps is less than obvious. Another false start.

Let us therefore examine the context of the phrase "vaulting variable ramps."

It occurs in Cymbeline, the most magical of Shakespeare's last plays. Nasty Iachimo ("little Iago") tries to persuade Innogen that her virtuous husband Postumus has been unfaithful -- that he has, in another splendid Shakespearean phrase, "partner'd with tomboys." The situation excites Shakespeare's exuberant pen. Iachimo embroiders "tomboys" and claims that Postumus has consorted with "with diseased ventures/ That play with all infirmities for gold/ Which rottenness can lend nature; such boil'd stuff/ As well might poison poison." Should she, that is, Innogen (and here Iachimo's rhetoric soars)

         Live, like Diana's priest, betwixt cold sheets,

         While he [Postumus] is vaulting variable ramps,

         In your despite.  

"Ramps," therefore, are the opposite of Diana's priestesses, who live chastely; they are in fact loose women. Ramps who are neither architectural nor vegetable, but sexual and promiscuous. At least, they are so in this instance, because otherwise "ramp" carried a meaning closer to "virago" -- in 1611 an overbearing woman but not necessarily an unchaste one. The word "ramp" in this signification has disappeared but has bequeathed us "rapscallion" (which was earlier spelled both "ramscallion" or "rampscallion.") There is no evidence to support the easy inference that rapscallion combines "ramp" and "scallion."

"Vaulting variable ramps" means "to engage in a series of athletic sexual encounters." 

To vault into a lover's bed might seem to border on the comic but I don't think that it does so in this case. Shakespeare elsewhere seems to imagine intercourse as a vigorous event. A brothel is in his language a "leaping house." And surely it's not comic when Juliet hopes that Romeo will "leap to [her] arms."

The conception behind "vault" and "leap" reappears in the contemporary demotic phrase "jump his/her bones."

Ramps:

• 

   

 

 

 

 

Jot and Tittle

First of all, let us dismiss the notion that Charles Dickens invented a pair of persnickety punctilious accountants and named them Jot and Tittle. Sorry, it could or should have been the case, but it's not so. Nevertheless, both "jot" and "tittle," often found in each other's cozy company, have stories to tell.

Take jot, for example. In the masterful "seduction scene" in Shakespeare's Othello, Iago first torments the Venetian general and then pretends sympathy: "I see this (i.e. his nasty sly hints that Desdemona has been a-bed with Cassio) hath a little dashed your spirits." Othello responds defensively, perhaps a tad dishonestly: "Not a jot, not a jot."

The noun "jot" is not obsolete but it's not common either. What is a jot? A tiny bit, a shred, a whit, a speck, a scintilla, a mite, a trace, a skoch, an inkling, a dollop. Smaller by far than a mere smidgeon. But in its root meaning, was a jot a measure of liquid, such as an ounce? or of weight, such as a gram? A measure of distance?  A measure of time: "I'll be with you in just a jot."

Professor Google tells me it's none of those things and that I am entirely off track. "Jot" is alphabetic; it translates the Greek "iota," the smallest letter -- no more than a single straight line, a minimal minim. And therefore Othello might just as well have said (the words are cognates), "Not an iota, not an iota." He might have said it, that is, if he hadn't spent his dearest action in the tented field engaging exclusively in broils and battles, but instead had studied at some North African classical academy.

In fact, Shakespeare either didn't know or didn't use the word "iota," which seems not to have entered English until a generation after he ceased putting quill to paper. On the other hand, Shakespeare was mighty fond of the word jot, which he employed at least twenty times (though never so notably as in Othello), always to denote a small quantity and frequently to appear as a partitive: "jot of promise," "jot of ceremony," "jot of color," "jot of pleasure," "jot of blood.'" Shakespeare's "jot" can even signify a moment in time: "No, faith, I'll not stay a jot longer." (His "jot" is always a noun, never the converted verb meaning "to write a few words quickly.")

Shakespeare undoubtedly knew the word "jot" from its famous and mysterious appearance in Matthew 5:18. Here's the familiar King James Version (1611): "For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." The phrasing is almost the same in the Geneva Bible of 1576 -- the translation that Shakespeare himself knew and used. "For truly I say unto you, Till heaven and earth perish, one jot or one tittle of the Law shall not escape, till all things be fulfilled."

I don't know what "all things" are and I certainly don't know what is meant by "fulfilled." But why should I, since Jesus's prophesy has long baffled trained professional theologians. But I do know that the pairing of "jot and tittle" has become proverbial.

What, then, is a "tittle." No, it's not a very small female breast. Nor is it a diminutive seabird, though it's not difficult to imagine a rocky south Atlantic island frequented by the "Lesser, or Little Tittle." In actual fact, it's a stroke of a pen -- and one that's even smaller than an iota. Specifically, it's the dot over the lower case "i" or lower case "j." Or, in an extended sense, any simple diacritical mark. 

Shakespeare used "tittle" just twice. The first was in Love's Labor's Lost in a passage in which Shakespeare makes game of affected language. Pompous Don Armado de Adriano compares little things (the woman he woos) to greater things (himself) "Shall I entreat thy love? I will. What shalt thou exchange for rags? robes; for tittles? titles; for thyself? me." What a difference a "t" makes! "Tittle" makes its second, almost inadvertent, appearance in The Winter's Tale as an element in the dismissive reduplicative "tittle-tattling." Both of Shakespeare's tittles acknowledge that the word is an inherently silly one. Is it accidental that a number of words that resemble tittle are frivolous or infantile: babble, toddle, tattle, prattle?   

"Tittle" smacks of triviality. It lacks heft. It would have been a literary disaster, a catastrophe of the first order, if Othello had responded to Iago not with "Not a jot, not a jot," but with "not a tittle, not a tittle." 

[October 29]  Otis Brown responds: "Dr. M.: you've forgotten the most famous Tittle of all: Yelberton Abraham. How could you?

[November 2]  Vivian de St. Vrain responds:

 

My Afterlife

Shakespeare took a few shots at depicting a hellish afterlife. 

 

The most extended, if I remember correctly, belongs to Claudio in Measure for Measure. "To die, and go we know not where;/ To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;/ This sensible warm motion to become/ A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit/ To bathe in fiery floods,/ Or to reside in thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;/ To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,/ And blown with restless violence round about/ The pendent world; or to be worse than worst/ Of those that lawless and incertain thought/ Imagine howling: tis too horrible." It's a damned scary vision, and mostly easy to understand, though it helps to be reminded that sensible = having sense, "delighted" = darkened, "thrilling"= piercing, "viewless" = blind, and that "lawless and incertain thought" refers to non-Christian speculation. Shakespeare gives Claudio a number of choices for eternal suffering, each one worse than the other.  

 

When Othello realizes that Desdemona was innocent after all, he foresees a one-dimensional hot hell, one in which devils will "Blow me about in winds, roast me in sulfur/ Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire." Clear enough, painful enough.

 

And finally, Lear imagines himself "Bound upon a wheel of fire,/ That mine own tears to scald like molten lead." 

 

I think the whole afterlife thing is a fraud, but if there were a hell, here's what mine would be like.

 

I'm on a commercial flight, steerage class, cramped into a seat too narrow and lacking adequate leg room. A middle seat. On my left is a very large gentleman whose massive shoulders and thighs encroach upon my territory. He stinks of tobacco. He drinks too much alcohol and tries to engage me in conversation. On my right is a similarly-proportioned lady who reeks of cheap perfume and who glares at me whenever my bony elbow makes contact with her fat forearm. I'm hungry and all there is to eat are some horrid plastic pretzels in a bag that only a safecracker could open. A scruffy fourteen-year-old boy sits behind me. Rap "music" leaks from his earbuds and he kicks the back of my seat at irregular intervals. My only reading matter is a airline magazine that advertises expensive gimcrack novelties that no sensible human would ever dream of buying. My bladder is distended and painful but the seat-belt sign is perpetually lit. This plane never lands. Sometimes it threatens to do so, but at the last moment it's diverted to another airport.

 

This continues throughout all eternity.

 

And it is much worse than vats of liquid fire. Far worse than anything that Shakespeare could possibly have imagined.

Shakespeare Gets Going

Setting aside the suspicion that The First Part of Henry the Sixth is a collaborative work or perhaps even a "prequel" to Parts Two and Three, the play can be read as if its first few lines were the earliest example of Shakespeare's playwriting. If so, then, what can be learned, right there at the very beginning, by looking closely at Act one, scene one, line one? 

Here's the first considerable speech in the play -- just about the very moment, let us imagine, in which Mr. W. S.'s "rough and all-unable" goose quill touched paper. Thirty-seven or thirty-eight astonishing plays lie in the future. 

The adventure begins as Gloucester eulogizes the recently-deceased Henry V. The speech is not brilliant, not accomplished; in fact, it's just plain vanilla ordinary. But it's a seed, a kernel.   

Gloucester:   England ne'er had a king until his time.

Virtue he had, deserving to command:

His brandish'd sword did blind men with his beams:

His arms spread wider that a dragon's wings;

His sparking eyes, replete with wrathful fire

More dazzled and drove back his enemies

Than mid-day sun fierce bent against their faces.

What should I say?  his deeds exceed all speech:

He ne'er lift up his hand but conquered. 

A reader or playgoer would have to be superbly insightful to predict that this Shakespeare would become the Shakespeare. This opening speech is a a mighty flat piece of rhetoric.

It's formulaic  -- simply a litany or list. First comes an item, a noun (virtue, sword, arms, eyes, deeds) which is then amplified by a hyperbolic qualifier (beams, wings, fire, sun). It's open-ended; it could go on indefinitely. But because it's so much a formula, there's no surprise--there's no mystery or excitement about where Gloucester is heading.

Moreover, for each element in the list, there's a congruence between the unit of thought and the unit of verse. The sentiment of each of the first four items on the list is exactly contained in a five-beat, ten-syllable line of verse--a pedestrian procedure which Shakespeare would soon transcend. And finally, there's an excess of old-fashioned, traditional alliteration: "His Brandish'd sward did Blind me with his Beams" "affects the letter" and browbeats the brain with the letter B. It goes almost without saying that there's nothing in this speech that is particular (Elizabethans would say peculiar) to either Gloucester or Henry. This is Anyduke reciting sentences about Anyking.

But then something truly amazing occurs.  Although it looks as though Gloucester is gathering his strength and his breath for a speech that might go on for forty lines and which would celebrate many more of the late kings's amazing attributes, he suddenly changes plans and truncates his intention:  "What should I say?  his deeds exceed all speech."

Gloucester seems to have run out of rhetorical gas. He is frustrated because he simply doesn't have the words. He throws in the rhetorical towel, so to speak. He surrenders. And he's right to do so, because at this early moment neither he nor Shakespeare has the power to generate a language that is equal to Henry's deeds. Better to stop speaking if you are utterly unable to say what you want to say.

Yet what is the task of such a playwright as Shakespeare?

It is not to do exactly what Gloucester admits that he cannot do? -- to find the words that are commensurate with the deed -- as Shakespeare certainly will when he returns to Henry in the 1598 play which concludes and climaxes this sequence of eight history plays. In a decade, Shakespeare will move from the pathos of "What shall I say?" to a rich eloquence that is up to the task.

"What shall I say?" is therefore an important question -- the most important question of all, in fact -- and the playwright asks it right here at the outset. Readers can watch and learn as Shakespeare little by little, in play after play, gradually invents a rhetorical style in which speech not only equals but eventually comes to exceed all deeds.  

All You Need to Know about Antres

"Antres" is among the rarest of rare words. Shakespeare's Othello speaks of "antres vast and deserts idle" in the magnificent oration in which he takes issue with the Venetian bigotry that claimed that he was only able to win white Desdemona by employing drugs and witchcraft. No, it wasn't because he was a sorcerer; it was because he was accomplished, heroic, romantic. "Antres" is one of the exotic words that defines the great African general as a non-Venetian -- an outlander, an "erring barbarian," an "extravagant and wheeling stranger."

Shakespeare coined "antres" just for the occasion, deriving it from Latin antrum, a cave. He never used "antres" again, nor did anyone else until Keats fleetingly revived the word two centuries afterward. "Antres" never domesticated into English and remains curious and remote, eternally in need of an explanatory footnote. It is unlikely that Shakespeare expected that a popular or even a courtly audience would grasp "antres" at first hearing. It's a risky word, but Shakespeare didn't become Shakespeare without taking risks.

The playwright coupled the neologism "antres" to another shiny new Latinism to produce "antres vast," a phrase which translates into the language of 2017 as "really big caves." Yet no translation can do justice to the spacious resonance of "antres vast." The caverns to which Othello refers are monstrously huge -- grown grander and even more inaccessible because Shakespeare ingeniously placed the modifier after rather than before the noun. "Antres vast" are a hundredfold more mysterious -- darker, more echoic, more glinty with stalactites and stalagmites -- than "vast antres."  

"Antres vast" occurs in tandem with a second and equally remarkable noun-adjective combination: "deserts idle." Othello reports that before he came to Venice, he had not only traversed "rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven" but had also dwelt among "antres vast and deserts idle." Strictly speaking, deserts cannot be "idle," but they can be vacant or useless. "Deserts idle" reinforces and augments "antres vast." Taken together, the two phrases are infinitely more evocative than either alone.

As a structure of sound, "antres vast and deserts idle" pivots on the "d" of "and" and the "d" of "deserts" and it positions "antres" and "idle" in symmetrical opposition. The two key words are dissimilar yet cleverly interlinked, each comprised of an open vowel (Antres, Idle), a dental (anTres, iDle), and a liquid (antRes, idLe). It is not by accident that "antres vast and deserts idle" is such a euphonious and mouth-filling phrase.      

Shakespeare not only invented "antres" for Othello's oration but also took care to surround it with other linguistic novelties. For example: Othello claims to have encountered "cannibals that each other eat/ The anthropophagi." "Cannibal" is now a commonplace noun, but in 1604 it was a newcomer to the language. "Cannibal" derives from "Carib," the name of a recently-encountered people--reputed to be man-eaters --who gave their appellation to the sea in which they lived. "Cannibal" was sufficiently strange--it had only made harbor in England (arriving by way of Spain) in the 1550s--that Shakespeare felt a need to define it, which he did once in English ("that each other eat") and once in Greek ("anthropophagi"). "Anthropophagi," a word that had originated with Herodotus, was as new to English--and as seldom employed--as "cannibal."   

"Antres vast," "deserts idle," "cannibals" and "anthropophagi" play crucial parts in Othello's stirring autobiographical fragment.           

         I spake of most disastrous chances,

Of moving accidents by flood and field,

Of hair-breadth scapes i'th'imminent deadly breach,

Of being taken by the insolent foe

And sold to slavery;  of my redemption thence,

And portance in my travel's history:

Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,

Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven,

It was my hint to speak -- such was the process.

And of the cannibals that each other eat,

The anthropophagi, and men whose heads

Do grow beneath their shoulders.

It's an astonishing story, each element more incredible than the one that precedes it. Hair-breadth escapes?  Every hero can boast of them. Redemption from slavery? A bit less likely. Hills whose heads touch heaven? A pardonable hyperbole. Cannibals?  Surely, less believable still. The Othello landscape then crosses the border from exotic to fabulous when it adduces "men whose heads/ Do grow beneath their shoulders." These headless men are the blemmyae -- Nubian or sometimes Ethiopian -- who were a feature of  pseudo-anthropological folklore from Pliny to Sir Walter Raleigh. The skepticism that these monstrous creatures ought to provoke is diluted because the road to the blemmyes passes through "antres vast and deserts idle." If audiences had not been lulled and seduced by "antres," they might dismiss Othello as a mere braggart soldier--rather than admire him for the near-magician that he becomes in his self-dramatization.   

Shakespeare had yet another purpose for "antres vast." In the sentence that treads on the heels of the "men whose heads/ Do grow beneath their shoulders," Othello abruptly turned his attention to Desdemona. His language dulls. "This (i.e. his exotic narrative) to hear would Desdemona seriously incline,/ But still the house affairs would draw her hence." Shakespeare strategically contrasts Othello's vocabulary to Desdemona's when he juxtaposes "antres vast" to "house affairs." Only the tinnest of ears can fail to be struck by the difference between the two phrases. Antres vast--house affairs; house affairs--antres vast. The gap between these two most pregnant phrases is small enough to allow the electric impulses of sex and romance to spark, but is too wide to allow genuine understanding or empathy to shoot the gap. The tragedy of Desdemona and Othello arises out of the unbridgeable space between "antres vast" and "house affairs."

Shakespeare therefore knew exactly what he was about when he invented the word "antres."

If he had been in a more antic mood, less determined to characterize Othello's massive dignity, he might have coined a word from another Latin word for cave, e.g. spelunca.  But "spelunkies vast" -- or even "spelunkies splendid" -- could not possibly do the work of "antres vast." 

"Enough is as Good as a Feast" or Possibly Better

"Enough is as good as a feast" has become my very favorite proverb.

 

It's  a warning against crass consumerism, against materialism, against the excesses of capitalist acquisitiveness. Cold water in a jelly glass, it asserts, is as good as your $500 wine in crystal. As they used to gloss the proverb, no "avaricious scraping together that knows no bounds."  

 

But for a fully "mature" guy like me, the proverb carries not only a figurative but a plain literal instruction, i.e., "do yourself a favor, eat less." Enough is as good as a feast if a feast makes your stomach swell, makes you heavy-lidded and gassy and passive, and if you feel a heck of a lot better when you haul yourself away from the Table of Plenty long before you reach satiety.

 

I can remember, as a voracious adolescent, eating three large, overstuffed hamburgers at a single sitting -- the roll overflowing with tomatoes, onions, relish, ketchup, etc. Along with a bottomless bowl of fries. And craving more. Then as a vigorous young man, a good portion was two hamburgers. Nowadays, I go halves with a friend. Hold the fries.

 

When my grandmother dished up those glorious blintzes of my youth, eight was my number. Now my number is -- one. And I feel the better for it.

 

Digestion is slower and, I suppose, less efficient. And then there's the embarrassing fact that hamburgers and blintzes and everything else settles right in the enlarged belly, the "front porch."

 

So here's a proverb for this latter age: "enough is better than a feast." Much. 

 

By the way, I first encountered the proverb, believe it or not, as the title to William Wager's 1581 morality. And then in Latin in Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost, where, Sir Nathaniel and the pedant Holofernes come on stage having just completed, apparently, a more than substantial dinner. "Holofernes:  'Satis quod sufficit.'" Perhaps Holofernes paraphrases and simplifies Horace:   

 

Multa petentibus
Desunt multa.
Bene est, cui deus obtulit
Parca, quod satis est manu.

 

(Those who seek for much are left in want of much. Happy is he to whom God has given, with sparing hand, as much as is enough.) 

And Now He's Come out of his Coffin to Advise Trump!!

I wrote the following long ago, republished it once. Here it is, relevant again.

What Doesn't Dick Cheney Commit Suicide?

Why doesn't Dick Cheney put a bullet in his brain? It would do him (and his reputation) a world of good. What could possibly stand in his way? Once he sprinkles the ratsbane on his porridge -- and, of course, leaves behind a detailed and humble letter of apology --  he will begin to free his soul of sin and to enjoy some peace of mind. When he has fallen on his sword, his lackeys and toadies will be able to claim that although he was a black-hearted knave, at least he wasn't a shameless black-hearted knave. They can try to persuade us that although he was egregiously and dangerously wrong, he was, like another suicide, Othello, "great of heart." But if Cheney continues in his surly, obstinate, unapologetic lip-curling silence -- why then, he'll go down in the books as an unrepentant demi-devil like Iago ("From this time forth I never will speak word"). 

Cheney has brought disgrace upon our beloved nation and upon himself. Using faked spy data, he suckered the ignorant, feckless Decider and almost the entire Congress into invading Iraq. His war has been a monumental disaster. "Full of scorpions [should be] his brain." At this moment of writing, Cheney is guilty of killing 3260 American soldiers and maiming (by official count -- who can possibly guess at the truth?) 24,314 others. If Cheney has even the most rudimentary of consciences, on it lies the heavy burden of 60,000 to 100,000 Iraqi souls. The Dickster has cost America $414 billion dollars, loss of prestige and the squandering of oceans of good will. Like Anthony, he "has lived in such dishonor/That the gods detest [his] baseness." But Antony took the proper course. When Cheney dispatches himself -- "after the high Roman fashion," let's hope -- he'll have taken the first step toward rehabilitating himself and the nation. For him not to do the deed would be ignoble. 

Dick:  I know that you're hunkering in your bomb-proof shelter. I know that you're up late at night, sleepless with guilt. You're cruising the internet, perchance googling "Cheney + suicide," and you're wavering in your purpose. Dick -- take my considered advice. I'm thinking of your place in history.  At this point, "you have no friend,/ But resolution and the briefest end."  You'll immediately feel better. It's a no-brainer. Go for it.

April 10.  Spike Schapiro comments:  "Dr. M. -- I've read your exhortation to suicide. You are, as usual, falsely optimistic. Cheney can't off himself because a) he's shameless and b) he's a total coward, and c) he has no self-knowledge and d) he can't point a shotgun. You cite the precedents of Othello and Anthony but they're both great spirits and therefore irrelevant. Cheney is a slug. Moreover, Cheney can't be "great of heart" -- he has no heart of his own --it's either a transplant or some mechanical contraption." 

April 4, 2014  Why is this man still alive?  Allowed to give interviews?  Is there no justice in our sublunary world? 

December 22, 2016  Only a silver stake in his heart is going to do it. Mirrors, garlic. Too late for prayers.

Fango

I'm marvelously fond of the Italian word "fango," which translates into English as "mud." "Fango" is expressive of the matter which it describes. To my ear, the word fango sounds slimy and disreputable, perhaps even repulsive, while its English counterpart "mud" is bland and lacks character. And "fangoso" is so much more dramatic than "muddy."

But why fango?  How did fango infiltrate the Italian language? The Latin word for mud is "lutum," which would naturally yield Italian "luto", which, as it happens, is a word that does exist, but, so far, one that I've encountered only in dictionaries. Fango it is, and gladly. Let us revel in fango. 

Fango, according to my bank of etymological resources, appears to be of Germanic origin and a distant cousin to the English word "fen," "a low land covered in whole or part by water." Lots of fango in that there fen, obviously. There's also a rare (my dictionary says 'poetical') French word "fange," for mud, but the more common word is boue. Boue is one of a handful of French words (other than toponyms) that are of Gaulish origin. So that when it came to mud, both the Italian and French languages adopted indigenous rather than Latin words. And for good reason: if there's any substance that is common rather than learned, it's mud.  

"Fango" bears no relation to English "fang." Fang is an oversized tooth, but not in its earliest appearances. Old English fang denoted plunder or booty, "a seizing or taking." The root meaning of grasp or capture is present in the name of Good Master Fang, an ineffectual officer of the law in Shakespeare's The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth. Yet fang as unquestionably tooth or toothy in Duke Senior's metaphor in As You Like it, where "the icy fang/ And churlish chiding of the winter's wind,... bites and blows upon my body."

Orts

"Orts" is a rare but tasty word. Orts are the bits of bones, gristle, stems, skins, pits and other inedibles that are left on the plate after one finishes eating -- the stuff that is scraped directly into the garbage can. Orts are to be distinguished from "leftovers" which are the uneaten remains of the meal that are carefully sequestered for tomorrow's breakfast. Leftovers good, orts bad.

Shakespeare uses "orts" twice in the plays, both times metaphorically. The first instance is in Julius Caesar, when Anthony tells Octavius how little he values his colleague Lepidus. According to Anthony, Lepidus is "A barren-spirited fellow; one that feeds/ On abjects, orts and imitations." In this instance, orts seems to be prompted by the word "feed." A second appearance of the word orts is in Troilus and Cressida. Troilus has discovered that his beloved Cressida has been playing at fast and loose with Diomedes: "The bonds of heaven are slipp'd, dissolved, and loosed/ And with another knot, five-finger-tied,/ The fractions of her faith, orts of her love,/ The fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics/ Of her o'er-eaten faith, are bound to Diomed." It's a strong speech and "orts of her love" is a powerful phrase, though rather obscure nowadays to audiences for whom the "ort" is a mystery --which certainly includes contemporary audiences.

Whether Shakespeare's first audiences would have required a footnote for orts I do not know. It was never a frequently used word, though the OED attests its presence in the language from 1440 to 1880. I don't know of any recent usages, but once, when I was at lunch with a group of professional Shakespeareans, I asked at the close of the meal, "What do we do with the orts" -- everyone at the table knew exactly what I meant. Rather a specialized audience, however.

Orts should not be confused with Oorts. The Oort cloud is the presumed boundary of the solar system, way out there, ten times further than Neptune, where the comets are thought to reside until they are dislodged from their proper home and come hurtling toward the inner planets. Orts and Oorts are both leftovers, in the sense that they are the remains of an original creation, in the one case chicken pot pie and in the other the universe. Orts are much smaller but more palpable than Oorts. Makes a guy wonder what could possibly be denoted by ooorts? Or oooorts?

Lola on Romeo and Juliet

The granddaughter, Lola, age 6 and a bit, has been reading to me -- a child's version of Romeo and Juliet. The feud between the Montagues and the Capulets distresses her. "Why do they have to fight. Why can't they just talk about it?  Why don't they use their words?"

Words of My Life -- Boobs

When I was a boy, the word boob denoted a simpleton, a nincompoop-- what Shakespeare calls a mooncalf and what in an earlier life I might have called a schmuck or a schmendrick. "Boobs" was an everyday expression; so common and pervasive that The Three Stooges might just as easily have been called the The Three Boobs. There were other related uses of the word; "booby hatch" -- a semi-humorous appellation for what was formerly called an insane asylum, and also the "boob-tube" -- though whether the boob in that doublet denoted the machine itself or the schmendricks who stared at it was never clear to me. But at some point in my linguistic career the word "boob" re-emerged with a new primary signification. It now seems to have become the most common word for the female breast.

I do not like it when a breast is called a boob. It is disrespectful. A breast is soft and nurturing but also erotic and enticing. A boob is neither; it is a denatured object, stripped of its warm associations and joined instead to foolishness and boobery. "Boob" is a deliberately unsexual and undignified term. It is also, as Shakespeare says in a different context, "base, vulgar and popular."

And available. If a person should happen to google the word "boob," perhaps searching for information of an etymological kind, the first, second, third and perhaps hundredth entry that he or she will encounter is for "boob selfies." A "boob selfie," for readers equally as naïve as me, is a photograph which a woman takes of her boobs and posts on the internet.

Jane Austen did not do this. Neither did George Eliot. I can't demonstrate that the word "boob' is responsible for such a decadent display of immodesty, but I do note that phrases such as "breast selfies" or "bosom selfies" are inconceivable. 

Nor did suicidal Cleopatra, when bringing the venomous asp to her breast, say "Peace, peace/ Dost thou not see my baby at my boob/ That sucks the nurse asleep."

Other words of my life: slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage.

Winter Love

My daughter's nephew-in-law, Zach Appelman, is a talented actor setting out on what might very well turn out to be a terrific career. (His ascent would be more rapid if he would take his aunt-in-law's father's advice and change his stage name to Zach Barrymore or Zach Zellweger, but the young man has too much integrity to comply with aged opportunistic wisdom).

Zach recently played Hamlet at the Hartford Stage in Connecticut (Hartford Courant: "a career-propelling performance that at times takes your breath away"). I spoke with Zach at the recent family Thanksgiving and he told me that the director of this Hamlet, Darko Tresnjak, made an effort to emphasize the play's comic passages. It was a good idea, I think, because Hamlet is both in reading and performance an intermittently hilarious piece of dramatic art. But, added Zach, sometimes the audience laughed at moments that he did not anticipate. He cited an example in the so-called "bedroom scene," where Hamlet assails Gertrude for marrying Claudius. Hamlet's rebuke of his mother is harsh and dislocating. About her marriage to Claudius, he says  

You cannot call it love;  for at your age

The hectic in the blood is tame, it's humble

It waits upon the judgment.

These lines apparently caused quite a commotion among the seniors in the audience. It is not hard to imagine why. Hamlet, for all his sparkling intelligence, is callow. He has youth's ignorance about middle-age sexuality -- as the silver-threads-among-the-gold demographic must certainly have recognized. How could Hamlet (or perhaps even young Shakespeare, a mere thirty-five when he wrote the play), know that desire and passion increase in middle-age as impetuous adolescent oestrus and fumblings are superseded by mature appreciation and achievement.

I doubt that Shakespeare meant Hamlet's lines to be funny -- there's no room for humor in the rhapsody of words that the prince directs at his mommy. Nevertheless, a modern sophisticated and wrinkle-deep-in-time audience cannot help but titter at Hamlet's grotesque misjudgment.   

These observations on sex in youth and age were still percolating in my waiting-for-wisdom brain while I re-read, for, what?  the fourth or fifth or sixth time, Anthony Trollope's excellent 1857 novel, Barchester Towers. My attention was caught, this time through, by one of Trollope's digressions, very pertinent to the topic of autumnal love, and which I now transcribe in a slightly reduced version and which I think is well worthy intense study, especially by my readers of certain late-hectic ages.

"It is, we believe, [says Trollope] common with young men of five and twenty to look on their seniors -- on men of, say, double their own age -- as so many stocks and stones -- stocks and stones, that is, in regard to feminine beauty."

(Let me interject that for "young men of five and twenty", think "Hamlet." And when Trollope talks of "feminine beauty," let us recognize that the phrase is a  euphemistic Victorian surrogate for issues of human desire and sexuality that conventional taboos made it impossible for Trollope to address forthrightly.)

"There never was a greater mistake [continues Trollope]. Men of fifty don't dance mazurkas, being generally too fat and wheezy; nor do they sit for hours together on river banks at their mistresses' feet, being somewhat afraid of rheumatism. But for real true love, love at first sight, love to devotion, love that robs a man of his sleep, love [and here Trollope begins to quote from the famous passage in Love's Labor's Lost] 'that will gaze an eagle blind, love that will hear the lowest sound when the suspicious head of theft is stopped, love that is like a Hercules still climbing trees in the Hesperides, we believe that this best age is from forty-five to seventy."

Forty-five to seventy, ladies and gentleman. Just the age of the men and women in the Hartford playhouse who snickered at Hamlet junior's incomprehension of his mother's passions. 

And then Trollope brings his excursus to conclusion with a great sentence in which he both disses and dismisses immature youthful ardor:

"Up to that age [i.e. forty-five] men are generally given to mere flirting."

 As perhaps Hamlet flirts with Ophelia.

It's intriguing that Trollope recognizes that men of seventy summers may still be ardent lovers and appreciators of the flesh. If he had been a little older and more experienced, he would have increased his estimate to seventy-five, perhaps even eighty. After all, eighty is the new seventy, is it not?  Or he might even have acknowledged that it ain't over until it's over.

Trollope was only forty-two when he wrote Barchester Towers, so perhaps he knew that he was only capable of mere flirtation with Rose Heseltine. But he was 67 when he proposed, in the nasty dystopia The Fixed Period, that 68 was the age at which all men should be required to give up the ghost. The Fixed Period is a novel which, at least to this septuagenarian, provokes not titters but guffaws. Poor Anthony T. had become so terribly sour, so unlike the Trollope of Barchester.

Nobody Cares

There's a brief sentence in The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth that continues to move me no matter how frequently I return to it. I's a passage that resonates in my latter-day soul. 

Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet (whose name, obviously, indicates her profession) are old acquaintances and old rivals who are evermore at odds. "They never meet but they fall to discord."  They seem to delight in exchanging insults. To Doll, Falstaff is a "muddy conger," "a huge full hogshead," "a poor ape," and even, when she is more affectionate, "a whoreson little tidy Bartholemew boar-pig".  Falstaff is equally abusive. But at one point in the play, there is a magical moment when Shakespeare allows Doll to propose a truce. 

"Come," she says, "I'll be friends with thee, Jack, thou art going to the wars, and whether I shall ever see thee again or no there is nobody cares." 

I think that what electrifies me is the last phrase, "there is nobody cares. "  A less imaginative, less empathetic writer than Shakespeare would have ended the sentence more predictably: he would have written, "nobody knows" and would have therefore repeated the commonplace that the future is unknowable. But Shakespeare raises the ante -- as he so often does. "Nobody cares" is demotic shorthand for "nobody else but we two care"-- which I take to suggest that Doll reflects not that the universe is dicey but rather that we are each of us isolated and unimportant except as we are valued by our nearest friends and the people with whom we have gone through life.  

The sentence is nostalgic in the best sense. It is not sentimental;  Doll does not romanticize hers or Falstaff's past. Instead she faces the aleatory universe bravely. You are at risk, it could turn out badly, let's be friends now, all that matters is the moment. The sentence is valedictory and at the same time extremely warm. 

Perhaps I'm projecting my own feelings onto Doll Tearsheet. I'm at the point in my life in which I value (perhaps even treasure) the people whom I've worked with, or argued with, liked or loved.  (I have even come to value some whom I've not loved.) They're all part of the fabric of my life and they are all disappearing, one by one -- going to the wars, we might say. And nobody cares. Except us. 

A New Machiavel

I tried the first three installments -- a netflix diskful of episodes  -- of House of Cards. I plan to watch a few more, but I'm deep into negative enthusiasm, not at all sure that I'm going to continue. Cards certainly grabs you, and it's startling and theatrical, but it's also far too cynical and depraved for my rose-colored tastes. I just don't believe in it. I know that it's all the rage to assume that politicians are horrid and power-obsessed -- but every one of them, all the time, without a moment of relaxation or redemption?  And so I'm skeptical of every character, every twist in the plot, every nasty turn of phrase. And because I'm skeptical, I just can't, as they say, "get into it." Or at least, not all the way in.  (Full disclosure: during episode three I fell into a 'deep rest,' sometimes denominated a minor nap.)

The character who dominates House of Cards is Kevin Spacey's Frank Underbelly -- I mean  Underwood --  who is fascinating but not credible. Or rather, he is not designed to be credible, because he regularly violates the fourth wall and converses intimately with viewers. Underwood is ruthless, implacable, ambitious, vengeful, depraved, vicious, malignant, and amusing. He turns his audience into his co-conspirators.

And where have we seen this curious concatenation of traits before?  Think back, fit audience though few, to your college class in the History of English Drama. There you encountered the vice and his crossbred friend, the machiavel,who were ubiquitous in medieval drama. Shakespeare brought this semi-supernatural hybrid to perfection two separate times -- once in the person of Richard of Gloucester in Richard III and then again as Iago in Othello.

Richard of Gloucester winks to his audience that he "can smile, and murder whiles I smile,/And cry 'Content' to that which grieves my heart, /And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,/ And frame my face to all occasions."  Now if that isn't Frank Underhill to a T, first spotted killing a puppy and a few scenes later baldly and straightfacedly lying to his President. Richard can "set the murderous Machiavel to school" in order to gain a crown; our unFrank friend Frank once wanted to be secretary of state, but now he just wants revenge. Richard and Iago are capable not only of falsity but even of murder to get what they want. Both of them kill their own wives. "I'll have her, but I wlll not keep her long," says Richard of Queen Anne. 

And therefore If I were to offer advice to Zoe Barnes, the reckless young reporter for the Washington Herald, I would suggest that she steer mighty clear of Frank Underwood. I would tell her to read Othello post-post-haste and take careful note of what happens to Desdemona's lady-in-waiting Emilia. Hint: "Fie, your knife upon a woman."  

Zoe, please, please, get out of there while the going is good!

In Shakespeare's plays, Richard and Iago both overreach and come to grief. Richard is left to die on the battlefield and Iago is subjected to the rigors of Venetian justice ("Torture will ope his lips.") And that's what is supposed to happen to machiavels.

I'm curious as to what will happen to Frank Underhill. By rights he should be publicly humiliated and die a ghastly death. But inasmuch as we live in an exceedingly cynical age, we can guess that Frank will only die when Kevin Spacey is offered better work, or when ratings plunge, or when the series jumps its inherent shark.  

"Barefoot to Palestine"

I'm enchanted by a sentence in Othello that is spoken by Desdemona's lady-in-waiting, Emilia. She's helping Desdemona to undress and the two women are engaged in informal chat. Desdemona, perhaps wondering why she had the misfortune to fall in love with exotic Othello, allows her mind to wander. It comes to rest on a countryman of hers, a good-looking man named Ludovico. And then her interlocutor Emilia praises handsome Ludovico in words that should compel every sentient being to gasp in astonishment and admiration.

About Ludovico, Emilia makes a remarkable claim: "I know a lady in Venice would have walked barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip."

All that needs to be said is, wow! But let me try to explain why the sentence so transfixes me.  

It's hyperbole, but not the ordinary hyperbole of largest or smallest or coolest or most awesome. It's a hyperbole beyond hyperbole. A lesser writer might have said, "I know a lady who would have walked a long way to make love to him." Not Shakespeare. For "a long way," Shakespeare give us "barefoot to Palestine"; for "make love" he offers "a touch of his nether lip." It's extravagant and wheeling.

A hike, shod, to the holy land, would have been a long and exacting journey. Barefoot, beyond belief. The evocative word "Palestine" infuses religion and sanctity into a sentence about sex and desire -- and therefore generates a love-longing that is as powerful, as silly, and as ill-planned as a crusade. And for what aim? Not even, for this mythical lady hiker, a big, zonking, mouth-filling kiss; simply for the merest contact of lips. No, not even lips, just one lip -- the lower one. It's an hyperbole of minimalism.

In the poetry that Shakespeare knew from his childhood, it was men who would make the vows and undergo the trials to court their beautiful ladies. But this lovely sentence reverses the convention. It is, so to speak, Sadie Hawkins day in Venice. 

Emilia elsewhere asserts that women have desires as strong as lovers of the other sex; here she demonstrates that women's love-longing can be as ridiculous (and as powerful) as men's. 

And everyone who knows Othello will hear in the word "Palestine" an intimation of the violent act that once, many years ago, shook Aleppo.

A New Much Ado (2012)

The new Much Ado is a charming, understated success. The actors are not trained Shakespeareans; they're tv series folk, and they say the lines conversationally and casually, paying scant attention to the verse or to the mannered prose rhythms. It works, on the whole, although some of the great lines are delivered so unemphatically that they're swallowed and lost. Whoever would imagine that Benedick's "the world must be peopled' could slip by an audience without e'en a giggle. The text is judiciously pruned -- the only major omission the nighttime ceremony for presumably dead Hero -- but that's a scene that has always made me uncomfortable so I wasn't sorry to see it go. The Dogberry-Verges sequence is a brilliant deadpan triumph. There's very little added business, thank you, but what there is, is choice. The actress who plays Beatrice (Amy Acker) has borrowed so much from Emma Thompson's delivery (in the last filmed Much Ado) that if you were to close your eyes, you'd think that you'd time-traveled back to 1993.The director, whom I had never heard of but is apparently famous, is Joss Whedon. Thanks, Joss.

I've seen many many modern films in which hero and heroine don't get on at first but little-by-little find themselves in love and in marriage. But Shakespeare was there first. Beatrice and Benedick are the mom and pop of a half-a-zillion subsequent comedies. It's good to see them as alive and thriving as they are in this realization. 

Douglas Bush's Milton Course

In the mid 1980s, thirty-five years ago, I was 'in residence' for a week at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., researching an article on one of the lesser English Renaissance dramatists -- a pleasure as well as a condition of employment. The article that I completed turned out to be not a bad piece of academic prose, if I do say so myself, but not something for the ages either. It was a mere twenty years since I had completed my degree in "English and American Language and Literature" at a Large Eastern University, specifically Harvard. I was not drawn to the Folger for professional reasons only. It was a delight and a great privilege to hold in my very own hands and to read dozens and scores of four-hundred-year-old ephemeral books that -- more than the canonical literature -- helped me to understand the age of Shakespeare. Sermons by the wagonload, biblical commentaries, almanacs, political pamphlets, poems by minor and unknown versifiers, broadsides, medical textbooks, collections of jokes, how-to-write-a-letter-in-Latin trots, schoolbooks. The library possessed inexhaustible troves of such material. The Folger's plenty licensed my dilettante brain to follow its own naturally wayward inclinations.

While doing my duty and also having some fun, I fell in with a fellow Folgerite named Boyd Berry who was visiting from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. Over cups of coffee, Boyd and I discussed some of the less well-known writers of the period in whom we shared a mutual interest. I remember that we also talked about the teacher's perennial frustration at engaging the interest of our sometimes less-than-enthusiastic students. I do not remember what prompted me to ask Boyd this question: "what was the worst course that you ever took either as an undergraduate or graduate student." He replied, without hesitation, "Douglas Bush's lecture course on Milton at Harvard in 1961." I was flabbergasted, in part because I hadn't guessed that Boyd had been at Harvard during my years there, but more because I had enrolled in exactly the same course -- same time same station same year -- and because Douglas Bush's Milton course was also my own nominee for the worst course ever. Parallel lines had accidentally and miraculously met, so to speak. Although Boyd and I were the same age, he was one year behind me and had taken the course as a senior undergraduate while I had been a first-year graduate student. It seemed an astonishing coincidence, but then, the universe of students of English Renaissance literature is a small one. Nevertheless, the fact that we shared the same opinion about Professor Bush's course was comforting and, as they say, "validating." Boyd said out loud words that I had only speculated upon in petto. Perhaps I wasn't the only outlier.

Why were we in such accord? The obvious answer is that Professor Bush, then in the tail end of his much-celebrated career (he had uttered his infant cries during Grover Cleveland's second presidency), was tired and bored by his teaching and put little heart into the work. In brief, he droned, unconscionably. Not only did he drone, but it seemed as though there was an invisible shield between his podium and our seats. He didn't speak to us -- he addressed the empyrean. His lectures consisted of a superficial running commentary on Milton's poems. "There's a particularly lovely passage starting on line 695," -- as if a challenging idea would be beyond our collective capacity. If a student broke into the drone to hazard a question, Professor Bush's characteristic answer was, "Well, that seems self-explanatory." But Bush's classroom style was not the only reason for my unhappiness; I had more substantive concerns. 

Let me interject a few words about Professor John Nash Douglas Bush. Although almost forgotten today, Bush was by all odds the most formidable and learned literary scholar of his generation. He knew everything there was to know about English, Romance, and classical literature and had written a dozen comprehensive critical and historical books. If the gossip can be trusted, he greeted the dawn of each new day by reading two hundred lines of Latin poetry and a hundred of Greek. I am sure that he knew more about John Milton than Milton knew about himself. He had edited the volume of Milton's complete poetry (English, Latin, Greek, and Italian) and, astonishingly, had memorized the entire twelve books of Paradise Lost. He was an exacting scholar and a stylish and witty writer. Moreover, he was a kindly, gentle man, cordial and generous to his students -- even to me. If he had flaws of character, I didn't know of them. To my mind, he was an unimpeachably excellent person and scholar -- and at the same time a teacher from whom I learned just about nothing.  

I was once invited -- along with a clutch of my ambitious graduate-school classmates -- to some sort of reception at Professor Bush's Cambridge residence. His home was exactly as it should have been -- that is to say, if one were making a movie about a distinguished Harvard professor, one's location scout would not rest until he discovered the Bush quarters. It was a spacious and civilized home presided over by gracious Mrs. Bush, who was also exactly as she should have been. I remember that the giant main room in the house -- which must once have been two or more large rooms that had been sutured together, was Professor Bush's enormous study. It was more like an institutional library than something to be found in a private home. Just as one would expect, the study was lined floor to ceiling with handsome wooden bookcases chock full of an enviable display of publications in many languages, some of which I could identify. I remember being served sherry, I think, and also something preternaturally green and fishy on an unfamiliar but I'm sure very elite kind of cracker. This dream of an academic utopia filled me with envy. It also scared the living blazes out of me. Why? Because for all Professor Bush's elegance and his library, and his lovely deferential wife, his movie-set home struck me as soft, fey, self-satisfied, and bloodless. I was dazzled and intimidated by its splendors but at the same time wary and resistant. Only five years beyond crowded Erasmus Hall High School in darkest Brooklyn, I knew myself well enough to know that, however seductive, his style of life was not for me. I would have to find a more appropriate path. 

Now I want to step further back and report on two cases in which I was in conflict with Professor Douglas Bush. Actually, the conflicts were only on my side; Professor Bush, Olympian and serene, did not notice -- nor should he have, frankly. These incidents continue to haunt me to this day, sixty years after the fact. Both occurred not in the Milton course, but in an "advanced" seminar called "Science and Humanism in the Seventeenth Century." I must explain that the word "humanism" did not carry the meaning that it does today, as in the phrase "secular humanism" -- an approach to the natural world that is allied with agnosticism and which sometimes resolves into pure atheism. Professor Bush's humanism was the altogether different "Christian humanism." It was, in brief, the noble but ultimately unsuccessful Renaissance attempt to fuse the "inspired" and "revealed" truths of Christianity with the thoughtful, upstanding but unfortunately "natural" morality of the Greeks and Romans. If "Christian Humanism" could be distilled to a sentence, it would be Desiderius Erasmus' daring speculation -- that he would like someday to be able to say, "Sancte Socrates, ora pro nobis", or "Saint Socrates, pray for us."

I was a humanist of the secular variety -- by birth, inclination, education and because in my brain there was no place, not even a lone neuron, where "faith" or "prayer' or "worship" might in more standard heads be lodged. Bush, on the other hand, was not just a scholar of Christian Humanism, he was an honest-to-god trapped-in-amber Christian Humanist -- and a devout one, deeply rooted and entirely comfortable in late medieval/early renaissance thinking. In his seminar on Science and Humanism, humanism was right and just, and science, its antagonist, was, if not altogether bad, at a minimum a very dangerous alternative. Did not both Bacon and Descartes assert that "nature" -- the real world -- could be studied directly, on its own terms, rather than as an entity infused with god's being and majesty. That we mortals might study nature not to reaffirm the goodness and omnipotence of god, but to accumulate objective knowledge and to reap practical material benefits. It's a fact that the separation of nature from the "truth" of religion has over the centuries unquestionably led to the marginalizing of Christian thinking and therefore, according to Bush's view of the world, to the steep decline of civilization. The world, no longer driven by revelation, has been going to hell in a heathen hand basket, as Professor Bush said or implied every Tuesday at 4:00 pm.

Regular readers of this blague as well as Dr. Metablog's family and friends will recognize that Youthful Me did not accept Bush's premises. In fact, in those days, I was probably even less open to religious ideas than I am now. And therefore, each Tuesday was a day of discomfort.

And then, one afternoon, Professor Bush began the allotted two hours by launching a surprise assault on the then-new and controversial Third Edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The Third had shocked traditionalists. Until 1962, dictionaries had been "prescriptive "-- that is, they explained how language "should" be used and they stigmatized as colloq. or subst. [substandard] those words or expressions that fell beneath the bar. The Third forsook tradition and was not prescriptive but descriptive. It aimed to record the language as it was really used. The Third therefore included many words hitherto banned as slang or vulgar and it was loose and permissive with regard to "shall" and "will", and "imply" and "infer," etc. For Professor Bush, the Third was a plunge into darkness -- another example of the collapse of Western Civilization as we know it, or should know it. So he excoriated the new dictionary and its editors and its supporters. The tirade having been completed, he turned mildly to the class and asked if anyone present had a different opinion. Now I had learned a little about modern linguistics at Cornell, and I was a descriptivist both by education and democratic instinct, and I knew that Bush was completely out of step with contemporary thought. I was astonished to discover that I knew more about this particular field of knowledge than he. But, alas, I was totally intimidated and did not open my mouth. What abject cowardice on my part! Nary a word did I say, and so the class segued to a discussion of the Cambridge Platonists and their vain attempt to tame and assimilate Descartes and Spinoza. I still wonder if any of the other 2G's around the table were aware of my shame. Probably not -- did my peers, the late Arthur Oberg, the late Jake Mills, the late Brian Hepworth, the late Terry Logan, the late Bill Godshalk, and others whose names I have forgotten, notice my moral collapse? I suppose that it's too late to worry. Nevertheless, my failure to raise my hand and voice still humiliates me, still rankles. 

Another Tuesday, another surrender. In 1961, William Empson published his innovative study, Milton's God. While Empson was not as learned as Professor Bush (no one was) he was a much more imaginative and challenging reader. Some say that after Johnson and Hazlitt, Sir William has been English literature's most insightful critic. Empson was an intellectual and social dissenter (he had been banished from Magdalen College, Cambridge when a condom [horrors!] was discovered among his possessions). He had written two highly influential critical books that every serious mid-century student of literature studied -- the first on ambiguity, the second on pastoral. Empson read Paradise Lost through a very different lens than Bush. He was not a Christian; in fact, he confessed himself anti-Christian because he judged there to be a serious moral flaw at the heart of the religion -- that the sacrifice of Jesus was a highly elaborated form a scapegoating. About Paradise Lost, he concluded that God (that is, the character God in the epic) was confused and contradictory, repeatedly tying himself into logical and rhetorical knots in order to justify the unjustifiable. He also argued that irrespective of Milton's intention, the character God became more complex and interesting when he became less ideological and more dramatic; more, so to speak, human. He revered Paradise Lost, but for his own, not Bush's, reasons. Milton's God was trashed by Professor Bush, who dismissed Empson as a simple "village atheist." I was stunned. True enough that Empson was an atheist, but true also that he was a powerful thinker, not someone to be given the back of the hand with a flippant ad hominem. Bush's review came out in The New York Times on a Sunday; the following Tuesday, our teacher was lauded by my fellow seminarians. He basked in their admiration. Did my young colleagues genuinely agree with Bush, or were they egregious sycophantic toadies? I don't know and will never know. And then, after the celebration, Bush asked, as if he were open-minded, "Does anyone here have a different opinion?" If Empson had been summarily dispatched, what chance had I? So once again, I fled the field, remained mute -- and slunk deeper into my expensive leather chair. 

So there they were, my two abject failures of nerve.

 

Have I flagellated myself sufficiently? 

 

But now I also remember a third Science and Humanism event -- the Tuesday that Professor Bush fell asleep.

 

The class routine was for members of the seminar to offer a ten-minute presentation on the topic of the day, after which Professor Bush would initiate discussion with the unfocussed inquiry, "Any questions, or comments? " At which point I would yearn for my Cloak of Invisibility. One fatal day, the student in question was John Knott, a fine and intelligent youth but not a ball of fire, oratorically speaking. When he brought his effort to a close, there at the head of the table sat Professor Bush, eyes closed, breathing rhythmically, his large round head bobbling on his small round body, lost in blissful slumber. A few seconds went by, then some more seconds, a minute, a minute and a half. Thanks be to all the gods in the pantheon that he did not snore! And yet there we all were, arrayed around that splendid dark mahogany table, frozen. No one moved or even twitched, no one spoke, no one made eye contact with a fellow sufferer. No one breathed. It was unbearable. At last, after another twenty or so ticks of the clock, I had endured all I could endure, and I raised my Complete Poetry of John Milton into the air and was just about to let it slam, when Professor Bush opened his eyes, and without the slightest acknowledgement that something unusual had occurred, intoned the familiar words: "Any questions, or comments?" 

 

I do not recall this event in order to nip at Professor Bush's revered heels. Every teacher is entitled, occasionally in a long career, to lose focus while a beginning graduate student discourses on a volume such as Henry More's Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness (an important-in-its-own-day [1660] monograph eloquent in support of rational providentialism and the preexistence of the soul). For all I know, Professor Bush may have been exhausted because he had been up past the midnight hour Monday night, possibly contributing more to scholarship in an evening than I did in an entire career. In hindsight, it was not the sleep itself that distressed me -- it was the passivity and silence of my fellows -- and the fact that when I remained silent I  honored the charade, the falsehood, that Bush was not asleep. Faced with an emperor's-new-clothes opportunity, I punted. 

 

Just as I had failed to defend modern linguistics, had failed to defend the "village atheist," so I failed to bang my book on the board -- an act which would have been forthright and honest and true to myself. The first two events were disgraces of an intellectual kind; the third was one of manners and, I think, of social class. The alliance of Bush and Harvard had overwhelmed me, taken from me my natural freedom of action. Let me confess that it was a secret guilty pleasure to have been accepted into Harvard's kind embrace. I feared banishment. Would I have still been welcome, would I have been worthy, would I have been a gentleman if I had noisily ended the nightmare. I felt, and I feel to this day, that all of us around the table were in an implicit, unacknowledged conspiracy not to notice the obvious so that we could protect the reverend professor and therefore defend the institutions that he exemplified. We contrived not to notice Bush's well-earned snooze because to do so would have punctured the balloon. It would been bad manners, barbaric manners, and to exhibit bad manners in a wood-paneled seminar room would mean that we were not genteel, not civilized, unworthy of Harvard and of the privileges it bestowed on us. 

 

On the other hand, I myself had only twenty-two years on my scrawny back, and was just five years out of rambunctious Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush, where if a teacher were to fall asleep in class, he would within seconds have been met with derisive catcalls and a squadron of paper airplanes. And I admit that, although I conformed myself superficially to the ways of my "betters," I had enough of a residual catcall-and-paper-airplane soul that I have regretted my inaction now these sixty years. 

 

Family, friends and stray internet pilgrims: perhaps you think that I'm making too much of these trivial long-ago-and-far-away events. Far too fraught, too melodramatic. Are you not, readers, skeptical of the idea that he (that is, me) honestly believes that the essence of his being was threatened by a seminar in seventeenth-century European humanism? Possibly you also think that I exaggerate the gap between Harvardity and Brooklynity. So let us return to early 1960s and re-examine the historical context of these events.

 

I have reported on Douglas Bush's theological convictions; let us now turn to his retrograde views on education.

 

Bush was, without question, an unapologetic elitist. I don't mean "elitist" as the word is now popularly used -- as an all-purpose insult to those who are presumed to think that they are better than we because they are wealthy or have studied to a prestigious college. I mean elitist as in "snob." Bush was an elitist because he felt that education was only for the elect. Once you admit ordinary, common folk, by golly, the end is near. He was blunt: "education for all, however fine in theory, in practice ultimately leads to education for none." He deplored the ungenteel idea that "students [would] come to college out of a desire for economic or social advantage." Let them stay in the places to which they were born! In a still shocking moment of undiluted social and racial snobbery, he pronounced that "the rising flood of students is very much like the barbarian invasions of the early Middle Ages." "Barbarian invasions"? His metaphor is "self-explanatory," is it not?  Bush presented himself as a guardian at the gate, protecting Christian Europe from the wild-eyed, uncivilized incursions of Lombards and Visigoths. And how was I to understand the analogy?  Did it not apply to me? Was I a civilized European or was I a violent Vandal? In theory, once I was admitted to Harvard's sacred precincts, I became an insider. But in reality, in my heart, I could identify only with the migratory hordes. Although I was camouflaged by my thrift-store jacket and tie, and I did not bring my seax to class, did not subsist on mare's milk, and felt no urge to sack Harvard, I knew myself to be, in essence, an interloper -- an abominable Avar, or brutal Bulgar, or horrible Hun. Or, in my particular case, a member of the tribe of anxious Ashkenazim. 

 

So now let us circle back to the beginning. Why was "Douglas Bush's Milton course" the worst class ever? For me, it was not just because Bush regularly lulled his classes to sleep. It was also because in his illiberal hands, John Milton, my John Milton, was diluted and distorted. I was, ante Bush, an admirer of Milton's courage and I was infatuated with his poetry. Milton is the only poet in the language, I believe, who ever equalled Shakespeare. Lycidas (written in 1636, the year of Harvard's founding) is in my opinion the world's single best poem. In tribute, I had memorized its 193 glorious lines. Moreover, Milton was a truly admirable human being. He was the furthest left, the most radical figure in the whole of English literature and perhaps in western literature. Did he not defend the execution of Charles I and the end of monarchy?  Did he not argue that marriage should be based not on dynastic alliances, but on love and sexual compatibility? Did he not authorize every individual to interpret the Bible in his own way, without the interference of a church or its priests and ministers -- the "priesthood of all believers?" And was it not true that he composed the Areopagitica, a seminal, essential contribution to freedom of thought?  But for Bush, I regret to say, Milton's impassioned advocacy of human dignity distracted from his poetry. He daydreamed in class about the poems Milton might have written if he hadn't allowed himself to be waylaid and distracted by politics. My Milton, on the other hand, was as much a public man as a poet. He had willingly given twenty years of his life and his precious eyesight to work for the radical transformation of society and for human freedom. Bush's judgment was in my opinion a major error, a disabling error, and it meant that the professor, however knowledgeable, was so blinkered by his conservative ideology that he missed the defining points of Milton's life. Just as I could not fully embrace Bush's Milton, he could not or would not ever fully grasp the greatness, the importance of my Milton. It therefore irked me to sit and listen every day, while Milton's contribution to world history was neglected, discounted, or dismissed. It hurt. 

My Life on "The Hill," 1969-2009

We settled on University Hill by lucky accident. Shortly after accepting a teaching position, I received a letter from my then-chairman Harold Kelling, urging me to write immediately to Professor J. D. A. Ogilvy, who had a house to rent near the University. I jumped to follow instructions and in August, 1969, the four of us (ages 30, 29, 4 and 2) took up residence in a small and lovely jewel of a Craftsman bungalow at 9th and College. It was not only a splendid home in which to start life in Boulder but it was also conveniently located: walking distance to Norlin Library, to the bus to Denver and to the Boulder Public Library, as well as just a block and a half from Highland Elementary School. We lived in that fine house contentedly until January of 1973, when (we were now 5, Eve having joined us in June of 1970) it became clear that we needed room to grow. The boys, Nathaniel and Ben, were adamant that we must remain in the Flatirons school district (Highland had been closed and abandoned -- a significant loss to the community). The children had good instincts; Flatirons Elementary was a wonderful school. It was led by Robert Rea, the finest principal I've ever known. During the winter of '73, we migrated from 9th all the way to a 10th street house that had, as they say, "good bones" but which had been "modernized" -- actually brutalized -- by a succession of owners who had trashed almost all of its Arts and Crafts splendors in favor of oversized mirrors, bright green shag rugs, beaded curtains, flocked wallpaper, and plate glass (replacing stained glass) windows. But heck, it was spacious for a family of five even though fabulously expensive ($46,500). We felt fortunate. There was a bonus: when Althea returned to work after a seven-year interval of pregnancy, birthing, and nursing, she was able to walk back and forth to Boulder High School, where she taught mathematics for many years. With the purchase of the house, our commitment to the Hill strengthened.

10th street was our home for 35 years. Over the course of the decades, we restored our abused home to the extent that our resources permitted. We added insulation (its first) and a modern kitchen, refinished the oak floors and stripped the paint from the warm fir woodwork, replaced the wallpaper and allowed the ornate brass registers to glow once again -- and moreover, transformed a backyard wasteland into a pleasing peony-iris-daylily garden. I'm proud to say that we left the house in much better shape than we found it. Meanwhile the neighborhood, sad to say, did not improve along with us but spiraled downward. In 1973, when we arrived, three quarters of the 24 houses on our street were owner-occupied; when we departed in 2009, only four or five houses remained in family hands and the rest had devolved into rentals -- occupied and often over-occupied by CU students. Our block was representative of developments that took place on the Hill during our years of residence. While the Hill had once been an essentially peaceful place, with only a rare disturbance, by the turn of the century, it had deteriorated into a combat zone where we and our adult neighbors engaged in constant struggle with graffiti, overflowing trash bins, weedy untended lawns, noisy late night and early morning sleep-obliterating parties, neglected barking dogs, gratuitous intermittent fireworks (explosions, actually!), thefts, vandalism, as well as fraught face-to-face encounters with rude entitled young malefactors.

What had happened between 1969 and 2009? What caused the decline from a thriving pacific neighborhood to a disorderly student ghetto? There were a host of factors, a few of which I can enumerate. Probably most important is that the University added at least 10,000 students during those years and did not provide housing for a single soul. The Hill, just across Broadway, was easy pickings for enterprising landlords, many of them decent but some unscrupulous, who bought advantageously, and (inasmuch as rental licensing codes were largely ignored and unenforced), maximized their income by dividing dignified, solid old Victorian or Arts and Crafts homes into rabbit-warrens. Many of the new occupants were first-time-from-home students who came from far away, spent a semester or two boozed up and hung over, failed out, and left behind their tuition money, their damage, and their trash. What might have been profitable for CU was disastrous for the neighborhood. Along with the increase in the absolute number of students came a resurgence of fraternities. During the late 60s and early 70s, when many students opposed the Vietnam war and conceived themselves to be anti-establishment, fraternities were among the institutions that were disfavored. Membership in the frat clubs declined significantly, but then recovered with the coming of the more conservative, less troubled Reagan era. I need not dwell on the fact that the burgeoning fraternities, flaunting an ethic that was anti-intellectual and pro-alcohol, were a major cause of increased neighborhood disruption. Along with these factors, came the replacement of marijuana, the drug of choice during the antiwar era, with beer. Marijuana, at least in the mild varieties of the 70s, is a contemplative drug while beer is a noisy one.The turn to alcohol had the effect of increasing the number of bars at 13th and College; while there had only been a couple of drinking establishments when I arrived (Boulder had been "dry" until 1967), by the time I left, there were more than twenty such, and the area had become a drinking "destination" that attracted outsiders to the street and inevitably also to Hill fraternity and house parties. And then sometime during the 70s or perhaps early 80s, the University moved many classes from a Monday-Wednesday-Friday to a Monday-Wednesday schedule, which meant that the weekend, and weekend drinking, now began on Thursday night and continued until Monday morning. It was sometime during this period that a couple of national magazines proclaimed CU as the nation's Number One Party School, which I must assume negatively impacted its pool of applicants. In addition, the welcome liberation of women from oppressive social restrictions had an unintended consequence: it led to much more alcohol consumption by female students. What had once been a rarity -- a drunken woman -- became, I'm sorry to say, commonplace. (I had become accustomed to male revelers untrussing and pissing on my roses, but I was genuinely flabbergasted to see young women pull down their panties to squat on my front lawn). Still another factor was the advent of the cell phone, which made it easy for small nomadic bands of young people to find each other and rapidly coalesce into sprawling alcoholic hullabaloos. Both the city government and the university, two institutions that should have noticed these developments, remained supine and indifferent.

Then came the riots. In 1971 there had been a protest, which turned violent, against Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia. But the scary riots of the 80s lacked a political or social agenda -- as far I or anyone else could tell, they were meaningless expressions of anomie, anarchy, and vandalism. Asked for justification, students claimed that "there's nothing to do in Boulder but drink" -- an unpersuasive argument about one of the most prosperous small cities in the nation, one in which gymnasiums, theaters, libraries, hiking and climbing trails, swimming pools, and other recreational opportunities abound. The Hill experienced four riots in three years -- associated, if I remember correctly, with Hallowe'en or homecoming. Sloppy, reeling revelers crammed the streets, overturned vehicles, and hauled couches off porches to set dangerous street-corner fires. I remember one instance in which rioters on the prowl for fuel appropriated a substantial section of the wooden fence at the alley side of my lot. At last, the city took notice. A commission was empaneled to study and make recommendations. I attended a few of these meetings and was impressed by the seriousness with which the panel took its responsibilities. Members from the Hill neighborhood were Terry Rodrigue and Annie Fox. A report was issue and recommendations were made, but to no perceptible effect, and the deterioration continued. 

The riots led to the re-founding of the University Hill Neighborhood Association by the late Jane Stoyva, Rosemary Crowley, Steven Walsh, Lisa Spaulding, and  Eleanor DePuy, among many others. With my children now departed for college, I was able to become a contributing participant. Simply put, the Association was divided into two camps, which I thought of as the "enforcers" and the "socializers." The enforcers (among them Terry Rodgers, Gregg deBoever, and Ken Wilson) patrolled the neighborhood on Friday and Saturday nights, calling in violations to the police. The "socializers" (myself and many others) tried every which way to integrate the students into the community. In retrospect, neither the one nor the other technique had much of an impact.

Nevertheless, the effort to socialize the young folk had very beneficial social side-effects, at least for me. For example, I was a member of a small group (with Kathy Tucker, Terry Rodrigue, and LeRoy Leach) that established the annual Beach Park Party (does it still exist?). Not only did these neighbors, who had been until then no more than faces to me, become my friends, but I had the delightful experience, several years in succession, of dishing out free ice cream to both adults and children. It was my best job, ever. On 10th Street, Althea and I initiated an annual block party, where, for many successive Septembers, we explained to new arrivals over hamburgers and beans that they were welcome to the neighborhood but that they should respect the people with jobs and young children who also lived on the street. For three or four years I was part of a group that met monthly at The Academy, trying to figure out how to make use of that institution's resources to benefit the community. I made a lasting friend with one of the participants, Ron Roschke, then pastor of Grace Lutheran. I edited an upbeat, cheerful bi-monthly newsletter that was distributed throughout the hill to permanent and new residents alike. In addition, I represented aggrieved neighbors at restorative justice hearings, where young scamps were counseled by their practiced attorneys that to clear their records and escape punishment, all they needed to do was to grovel a bit and feign remorse. I attended and spoke at many City Council meetings. I made many friends by patrolling our street on Sunday mornings with a black plastic bag, picking up beer and soda cans, empty cigarette packs, those ubiquitous red beer cups, and various pieces of discarded clothing. (If there's a good reason why a bra should lie in the gutter on a weekend morning, I can't imagine what it might be.) I made my best Hill friend, Vin Scarelli, when we met at 2 AM, both of us on the hunt for "trumpet man" -- a student who like to pop out of his house in the wee hours, blow his trumpet (it might have been a bugle) as loud as possible, and then scurry inside before anyone could nab him. The reward for these activities was that I became member of a vibrant community -- and there's nothing like a common enemy to bring people together

I left the Hill in 2009 in part because I was exhausted by the fight but also because Althea's illness had progressed to the point that we needed to live on one floor, with an elevator.

I reside now in an age-appropriate downtown condo, but I regret that I can no longer walk around the block and enjoy a brief "how are you" with neighbors with whom I've collaborated on one project or another. I miss the society of the Hill, but not its disorder. Among its other virtues, there could have been no better place to raise children.

One might succumb to nostalgia -- except that when I sit on my Walnut Street balcony on a summer evening, I can hear distant booms coming from up there on the Hill, and I remember that they were exceedingly jarring and disturbing. The far off blasts remind me why I relocated and they cancel out any longing to return. But let me confess that if I were to come back to the Hill, I would return as a committed "enforcer."

Can the Hill be saved, or is it doomed to further decline?  There's no better location -- everything is at your doorstep -- schools, libraries, Chautauqua, foothills, all the diverse riches of a large University. It's a neighborhood of great architectural integrity -- an outdoor museum of 1900-1920 American design, almost as interesting as antebellum New Orleans or Art Nouveau Riga. Its housing stock is unparalleled in Boulder; in a better world, it would be a tourist destination. UHNA does a wonderful job of advocacy, but it's in an unequal contest with powerful political and business forces. I think it was during the 90s that a few of us, the late Neil King most prominently, tried to engage the university in an improve-the-Hill project. We proposed that the neighbors and the university (we hoped also for grant support) pitch in to create an entity that would buy houses on the Hill and rent them to, say, newly-arriving professors or staff who would otherwise be forced to commute from Lafayette -- nowadays, Erie or Ft Lupton. And by doing so little by little to undo and reverse the tipping point and rebalance the ratio of adults to students. Although Neil was persuasive and influential (he had once been city attorney), he could not develop any traction with either the city or CU. I am not sure if our plan was workable, but I learned that to save the Hill will not be easy and will require big money, big thinking, and the coordination of many disparate groups. 

In the meanwhile, the struggle between the  enforcers and the socializers continues. Should police educate or should they arrest and ticket our student hooligans?  Let's do both. If a new first year student arrives in Boulder on a Thursday, misbehaves during the weekend, and the following Monday forwards to his mommy and daddy the news of a $5000 fine -- well, that will certainly be educational, will it not?

My Life in Objects -- XIV (Puppy)

This woebegone object was once a plump and thriving stuffed animal -- a bear, in fact, though for some reason my children always called him "Puppy." Their only other stuffed animal, a snake, was named "Snakey." Pedestrian nicknames to be sure. I admit that our family wasn't very imaginative about naming our mascots.

Even though Puppy is past his prime, he's still a most treasured critter. If the house broke into flames, and I could only rescue one item, I'd have to grab Puppy and leave to their fates the jeweled goblets, the ancient diamond tiara, the Stradivarius, the Vermeers, and the First Folios. Puppy is more valuable.

Puppy looks as though he was abused, but it's not so. He was only loved to death. Because he was our only bear, the three children struggled for ownership. Poor Puppy was a field of combat. He was pulled, stretched, thrown, dunked, employed as a soccer ball, and in at least one memorable instance, voluminously vomited upon. Over the course of the decades, the sad fellow lost almost all his fur, his corneas, his entire snout, two-thirds of his stuffing, and both of his original ears. I myself attached two prosthetic leather ears, only one of which survives -- and also sewed on his asymmetrical leather mouth. In addition, early in Puppy's career, I performed a delicate musicboxectomy. 

Why only one stuffed bear to be struggled over? Why not three -- one apiece -- as would be sensible in families that hope to avoid sibling strife? Why the paucity of stuffed animals? Because both Althea and I came from families that were ideologically opposed to such indulgences. Grandma Anne, Althea's mother, wouldn't allow stuffed animals in her home because they were "unsanitary." My parents didn't much believe in toys of any kind -- kids were supposed to make their own entertainment out of pots and pans. (My father came from so impoverished a family that a stuffed bear would have been an inconceivable luxury.) Therefore my brothers and I grew up deprived of warm, furry, reassuring "transitional objects," which had no consequences whatsoever, for me, setting aside the periodic gloom and the vast existential void in my soul.

Puppy is now in my care because my children can't decide to whom he properly belongs. I hope they don't fight over him after I die -- he can't take any more pummeling. I stow Puppy in a drawer of the old Irish desk, but because of his long service to the family, he deserves much better. Rightly, Puppy should lie in state, ensconced in an illuminated lucite display case atop a stately jasper or malachite plinth. 

"Bisson Conspectuities"

"Bisson conspectuities" is one of my all-time favorite Shakespearean oxymorons. Although it's not as transparent as, say, "hot ice" or "living death," it's much more quirky and colorful. "Bisson conspectuities" appears in Coriolanus in one of the scenes in which Menenius banters with the Roman crowd. They attack and he parries by enumerating his own strengths and weaknesses. He concludes with an insult that flaunts his patrician education: "What harm can your bisson conspectuities glean out of this character?" (In this case, a "character" is a summary statement of a person's habits or nature, a "characterization".)

The odd word "conspectuities" is an invention of Shakespeare's. He derived it from the participial form of the Latin verb "conspicio" -- to observe, gaze, or watch. It's a nonce word, a hapax legomenon; unlike some of Shakespeare's more inspired coinages, conspectuities never domesticated into English -- the OED lists only this sole appearance. "Bisson," on the other hand, which means "blind," was not new to the language but was in fact an ancient word of Germanic origin -- and already obsolescent in 1608, although the venerable proverb "the bysom ledys the blynde" might still have been current in the provinces. In Hamlet, the deliberately archaizing First Player uses the expression "bisson rheum" for "blinding tears." 

"Bisson conspectuities" means "blind sight" or "blear vision." It's an especially striking oxymoron because its component parts are drawn from opposite ends of the word hoard -- old and new, plain and polysyllabic, Germanic and Latin, rustic and citified.

But there's a complication. The word "bisson" doesn't actually appear in the Folio; there it is "beesome." "Beesome, usually spelled besom, meant and still means, "broom." But in the context of Coriolanus, broom is meaningless; and so, beginning  with Lewis Theobald in the 1720s, editors have uniformly substituted "bisson" -- an inspired conjecture but still a guess. It's possible that Shakespeare wrote "bisson" and a scrivener or printer incorrectly read 'beesome" -- but perhaps not. An oxymoron of transcendent genius might be merely an illusion -- a creation not of Shakespeare but of editorial tradition.

"Bisson conspectuities" puts quite a burden on members of the Blackfriar's audience. It's hard to believe that Shakespeare thought his first hearers would grasp the phrase's meaning on the fly. It's easy for us to understand it now, four hundred years later, with a treasury of annotations at the foot of every page. Perhaps Shakespeare didn't care if the audience comprehended? Is it possible that he was writing just for his own delight, for his pleasure in words? For readers rather than playgoers? Or perhaps he had already divined that he was writing for enthusiasts and scholars of a latter age.

Year of the Rooster

The rooster came to our attention about a month ago. We heard him before we saw him. He was living at the edge of the forest, about one hundred yards from the house. After a few days he became bolder and we were able to catch a glimpse now and then. He's a Barred Rock, fully mature, with a bright red comb and superior wattles, but with woeful tail feathers. We don't know from where he came. We asked around but none of the neighbors is missing a rooster. We guessed: he's an escapee, or, perhaps his owner became tired of him and kicked him out of the truck, or (my favorite theory) he was in a rooster fight, lost his tail feathers and retired to the woods in shame. But in fact, we have no idea how he came to settle on our property.

Little by little he started to become more comfortable with us. He would spend his day in the flower garden, furtively eating insects. He was especially fond of earwigs. A good occupation, I thought. No harm except to the bugs. Eventually he came to tolerate our presence. He would sit a few yards away, studying me while I weeded. He gained our respect, because he managed to survive even though the forest is filled with foxes and fisher cats and weasels and coyotes and the air is patrolled by hawks. He liked to visit the donkeys and peck around their manure piles.  When he started to roost not in the forest but in the blueberry bushes close to the house I became concerned -- this may be more of a rooster guest than I need. And then he took up the habit of cock-a-doodle-do-ing at dawn just outside our bedroom window. And during afternoon nap time. And familiarizing himself with the vegetable garden, where he snacks on cucumbers. (He loves cucumbers.) He became ever more bold -- a few days ago he was just outside the kitchen, pecking on the glass door, hoping, I imagine, to be let inside. And when I didn't let him in, he left a large retaliatory splash of rooster dropping right at the doorway.

We looked out of the small north window of our bedroom and there he was perched on the railing, peering in. A peeping-Tom rooster. (Did he catch an eyeful!!) 

One day a near neighbor telephoned: "Your rooster is here."  "He's not my rooster."  

And then he disappeared. For the first time in a month, there was no crowing at dawn.  OK, we thought, some predator got him. One of these days, we'll stumble upon a bunch of black and white feathers in the forest.

But then a friend who lives on Ira's Pinnacle told us that he had seen a pair of chickens on Hackett Hill Road about a half a mile up the road. He couldn't be sure, but he figured it must be "your" rooster and a hen. 

So that's where he's been!! He's a gallinaceous gallant gallivanting with the local ladies. I thought, good for him; I don't have to concern myself with him any longer. He'll go feral and start a family. He must not know about Vermont winters.

But not so. This morning he was back, solitary, crowing vigorously outside my window. His romance, if it were a romance, didn't work out. I can't imagine why because he's become quite a handsome bird. He personable, friendly and he's grown an an impressive new set of tail feathers. He's plump and shiny; his walk, once furtive, has become a decisive strut. There he is now, cock-a-doodling his head off in the patch of cucumbers.

Zeus: the Apology

If I've offended anyone, I'm really sorry. I didn't mean to; I have tremendous respect for pretty and desirable women. 10s, all of them. So let me just start by saying that many years ago, decades or centuries I can't remember exactly when, I had a thunderous crush on Io. She claims that she signaled me that she wasn't interested, but I did not stop. You know, when you're a god, they let you do it. You can do anything. It was probably a mistake to have turned her into a heifer but I think she enjoyed it then -- even if she complains about it now. Same thing with Leda; it's possible that I misinterpreted her but I honestly thought that her "no" meant "maybe" or "yes," so I turned myself into a swan and grabbed her by the pussy. Maybe I should have backed off, especially since she had already spent that same night with her husband Tyndareus, who had, as everyone knows, very small hands, if you know what I mean. It's good to be a god. And then there was Semele. I mean, she was one of my very own priestesses, and I realize now that your own priestesses ought to be off limits. But she provoked me by bathing nude in the river Asopus. And I happened to be flying by in the shape of an eagle. What happened, happened. It was definitely wrong of her to ask to look at me face to face and I regret that I incinerated her, but it wasn't my fault. Europa was also an error, but she should have known better than to come near to me when I'm in the shape of a white bull. And the same with Taygete who came to me as a doe with golden horns. I couldn't stop myself. I've always had a thing for golden horns, though I think Pindar made a bit too much of it. And then there was Dia, who happened by, so she says, when I was in the shape of a stallion. What can you expect of a stallion? Alcmene, that's another story. She was tall and beautiful, with eyes that reminded me of Aphrodite. I definitely wanted her. I had to disguise myself as her husband Amphitryon to make love to her. Maybe it was wrong to do so, but I don't think she ever figured out what actually happened, which kind of excuses me. And then there was my adventure with Antiope, where I disguised myself as a satyr; and once you're a satyr well, you know, a satyr does what a satyr does. To seduce Callisto, I had to transform myself into Artemis, which sounds a little like girl-on-girl action, but it really wasn't because it was me. Come to think of it, I can't remember exactly how we did it. And also: I blame Acrisius for shutting up his daughter Danae in a bronze tower. I took it as a deliberate provocation. I had to sneak through an air vent to impregnate Danae in the form of a shower of golden rain, which, I have to tell you, wasn't entirely satisfying and just a little bit kinky.

But what can I say?  I don't want to play the victim, because, after all, I am a god, but I had a hard childhood, what with my father castrating my grandfather and then me being suckled by the goat Amalthea. You get off to a bad start when you're suckled by a goat. 

Side Effects

LENFERA is generally safe to use, but possible side effects include stuffy or runny nose, headaches, goosebumps, hiccups, cramps, sensitivity to bright lights or glare, shingles, gingivitis, numbness of lips or upper palate, dry scalp, ringing in the ears (tinnitus), acid reflux, dizziness, hair loss, hearing loss, kidney stones, constipation and/or diarrhea, sudden loss or gain of weight, inability to swallow, drooling, desiccation, macular degeneration, bunions, uncontrollable twitching or muscle spasms, rectal itch, toenail fungus, nausea, abdominal pain, difficulty with breathing, edema, fistula, halitosis, absence of libido, tachycardia, swelling in knees or other joints, scabiosa, bots, flatulence, loss of insight, roseola, Osceola, bloat, priapism, Purim, bowel obstructions, failure to thrive, scoliosis, creeping phlox, aggression, acne, increased facial or body hair, world-weariness, dyspepsia, rash, fatigue, agoraphobia, lycanthropy, fever, tremors, blurred vision or sudden blindness, frostbite, ringworm, procrastination, irritability, hot flashes, mange, barnacles, pellagra, night sweats, bladderwort, paranoia, clumsiness, thrush, zeugma, migraine, feelings of humiliation, heart arrest, tuatara, memory loss, white nose, rapture, paralysis, stage fright, bioluminescence, scurvy, hallucinations, chancre, catarrh, pink eye, red eye, rabies, insomnia, nightmares, spontaneous combustion, Coggins, blurring of gender identity, wasting disease, aphasia, blackouts, suicidal ideation, nosebleeds, woe, catatonia, gangrene, acute pain, multiple organ failure, death.

If symptoms persist, consult your physician.

LENFERA has been approved by the FDA.

Reposted: Antimylarmonofilamentarianism

In 1895, my wise and courageous grandparents left the abysmal, backward Ukraine and struck out for the new world. Nine years later, my father was born in a cold-water flat in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The date of his birth: December 22, 1904, exactly at the winter solstice. "And they called his name, Emanuel, God with us." If he had been born in the old country, before the Russian authorities imposed legal cognomina upon us, he would have been named Emanuel ben Isaiah -- his father's name appended to his own as a patronymic.

Despite his traditional moniker and his commitment to the essence of Judaism, my father was fiercely hostile to the irrationalities of religion. His view -- and my grandfather Isaiah's even more strongly -- was that for a thousand years our lineage had been kept in poverty and darkness not just by the czars and the Cossacks but also by the rabbis. In politics my father and grandfather began as socialists and became New Dealers; in philosophy, they rejected theological doctrine and were among the children of the Enlightenment whom Moses Mendelssohn had led to the promised land of evidence and reason. I doubt that any of my ancestors knew Karl Marx's sentence that "the criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism," but they spoke and acted as though such wisdom had been absorbed from the cradle. My brothers and I were taught to resist the exclusivity, superstition, and ceremony and especially the triumphalism of religion.   

We now have a religious controversy in our peaceful, progressive, and largely secular western town. A group of orthodox Jews have petitioned the city council for permission to construct an eruv. What is an eruv? It’s a “symbolic boundary that allows orthodox Jews to carry things, including their own children, outside their home during the Sabbath." (Carrying is considered work, and orthodoxy's strict interpretation of religious law prohibits sabbatical labor.) A latter-day eruv is constructed out of fishing line that is strung on utility poles; curiously, it may incorporate functioning electric and telephone wires. If you're within the lines, you're "in" your home.

I know that my forbears detested eruvim and similar expressions of irrational piety. I myself am not enraged by these useless but harmless superstitions. Constructing an eruv does not endanger our species; it's not like opposing contraception or prohibiting stem-cell research. An eruv consoles the believers and doesn't much bother the rest of us. Yet if there is a spirit in the sky, which I very much doubt, I would hope that he would not be so small-minded as to issue ukases about carrying infants on Saturdays; infants should be carried as much as they want, which is just about everywhere and always. And if the god of Abraham and Isaac has become so narrow as to promulgate an inside/outside-the-home rule, I would also hope that he would be intelligent enough not to be flummoxed by such transparent trickery as hanging mylar filament on poles.   

I have no intuitive conception of god, but I think that the orthodox trivialize our human and shared longing for transcendence when they sanctify such petty practices. It would be far more pious for the orthodox to take every nickel spent to appease the Ancient of Days and bestow it on a poor Jewish family from Tashkent. If the eruvim-makers can't locate eligible Jews, there are Hondurans and Sudanese a-plenty who deserve their attention. When the believers re-direct their enthusiasm and their resources toward truly charitable enterprises, they will honor the universal immigrant experience and they will also practice the very worthy Jewish virtue of compassion. The effort spent to construct an eruv is a foolish waste of time.

Here's my father's view:  "It took us hundreds of years to fight our way out of the ghetto and they want to put themselves back in jail. If the rabbis had their way," he would say, "Mahler and Bernstein and Gershwin would play accordion in a klezmer band in Bialystok, Einstein would balance the books for a caftan maker in Kiev, and a hundred and fifty Jewish Nobel Prize winners would squander their intelligence davening in a dismal Vilna synagogue."

I think it’s in a Wallace Markfield novel that an old Jewish guy confronts a group of twenty-something Jewish hippies/slackers in Miami Beach. After a heated discussion, he admonishes them:  "And don't ever be ashamed that you’re Jewish. It’s enough that I’m ashamed that you’re Jewish."

Which is pretty much how I feel about the eruvistas.  Well, not exactly ashamed.  Embarrassed, perhaps, by their superstitious infatuation with the "dark backward and abysm of time." 

"Crosspatch, draw the latch" and Industrial Capitalism

One of the most joyful of nursery rhymes, and a personal favorite, is this:

                               Crosspatch,

                               Draw the latch.

                               Sit by the fire and spin.

                               Take a cup,

                               And drink it up.

                               Then call the neighbors in.

The clicky rhymes and jaunty meter are undeniably beautiful -- and there's much more meaning than poems of this kind usually contain.

In the first triad, a "crosspatch," -- a "cross or ill-tempered person, usually a girl or woman" -- is at work, spinning. In the second triad, she's exhorted to drink and also to invite her neighbors "in" -- presumably into the room, or just as likely, the tiny cottage -- where she lives alone. In the first strophe, the theme is isolation, but in the second, isolation is challenged by the calls of society and by the hope of a more satisfactory and convivial life.   

What can we know or imagine about the surly individual addressed by the evocative designation, "crosspatch?"  The first element in the name --"cross"-- implies not only sourness, but also resistance, as in "cross-grained." The second element -- "patch" -- suggests that the crosspatch's discontent is not without cause. We can infer that she's poor because she's a person whose garments are either assembled from various rescued materials, as in "patchwork," or that her clothes are, in another sense of the word patch, repaired. In addition, it's possible that ill health has caused her skin to become "patchy."  But "patch" also signals a degree of mental stress, as in Shakespeare's "patched fool." In this signification, patch derives from Italian pazzo, crazy. The crosspatch is therefore disabled physically, socially and psychologically.

At the outset of the poem, our "crosspatch" sits glowering, impoverished, perhaps muttering indistinctly, friendless, without family, her youth blighted by poverty, huddled against the last embers of her dying fire. What is it that she is spinning? No doubt she ekes out a meager living in the impersonal mercantilist "putting-out" system. Some exploitative proto-capitalist venturer has delivered to her lonely door a quantity of unspun wool or cotton;  her job is to return the material to him in the processed form that will then be passed on to an equally poor weaver, then to a tailor, etc. She works alone and never sees the fruits of her labor except for the occasional, paltry farthing that allows her a bare subsistence. No wonder she is slightly barmy and has "drawn the latch" -- closed herself off from her fellows. But then, suddenly, comes the antistrophe, and in a series of importunate injunctives the crosspatch is asked to rejoin the company of humanity. "Take a cup,/ And drink it up,/ Then call the neighbors in."  What's in the cup?  Spiritous liquors, no doubt, which, though designed to dull the pain of wage-slavery, also act to augment the revelry with which the poem climaxes. The wine is not sipped, but it is drained to the lees. And once the door is unlatched, and the neighbors -- neighbors of both sexes, no doubt -- are called "in," why then, let the libations and the wild rumpus begin! Alienated labor is suddenly set aside and replaced by the natural bonds of one human being to another, and the stasis of the opening lines of the poem transforms in a flash into a wildly kinetic bacchanal. Emotional weakness transmutes into healthy liberated pleasure. Dour Puritanism, with its punishing work ethic, yields to the spirit of holiday and to pagan, perhaps even dionysian, excess. Here, in miniature, is the essence of the comic vision. In a few powerful lines, freedom, good humor, and natural appetite triumph over bondage, artificiality, social constriction and repression; the justifiably sullen crosspatch, in a burst of energy, reintegrates herself into the social nexus from which she has been banished.

Whether or not the crosspatch can permanently liberate herself from the oppressions of industrial capitalism, or whether the anodyne and spurious relief of alcohol is a merely transient solution is left unresolved. To ask a short poem, however dense with meaning, to answer so difficult a question would, just possibly, be to ask too much of it and, perhaps, to push the evidence the merest tad too far.

Cornell English Then and Now -- 6

After struggling through a run of mysterious and puzzling works, I'm cheered to discover a book written by Cornell English faculty member that I could read with pleasure from beginning to end. And understand. And which alerted me to books and poems with which I was not familiar. No theory, no pretentious jargon; just honest scholarship and intelligent stylish analysis, 

It's Facing the Abyss, American Literature and Culture in the 1940s, by George Hutchinson, who is Cornell's Farr Professor of American Culture.

Unlike Professor Hutchinson, who is a considerably younger man, I myself was alive (although barely sentient) during the 1940s. I was too young for serious reading, so 1940s culture didn't come to my aluminum desk until the 1950s when I belatedly came to awareness. As a result, I read many of the books that Hutchinson discusses a decade past their relevance. Hutchinson also mentions many influential books that I didn't read at all and therefore came as a surprise -- and which underlined my ignorance. For example, during the 1950s, my high school and college years, I read many books of 1940s Jewish American writers to whom Hutchinson devotes a long chapter: Mailer, Bellow, Malamud, Rukeyser, Arthur Miller, etc. But my acquaintance was incomplete. I confess that I had never heard the names of Jo Sinclair or Isaac Rosenthal, both of whom Hutchinson scrutinizes at full. One name missing from Hutchinson's survey is J D Salinger, who started to publish in the 40s but only became famous with Cather in the Rye in 1951. Just as well -- I never caught Salinger fever although many of my friends were quite infected. 

Hutchinson has presented me with a reading list of books that I should have known but didn't and that will keep me engaged for months. I'm grateful.

Hutchinson's chapter on WWII is most revelatory. Without being unduly partisan, it exposes and corrects the "greatest generation" mythology that I had half come to accept. 

After reading Facing the Abyss, I continued my investigation of Cornell English faculty publications by taking a couple of wild swings at Elizabeth S. Anker's mystifying On Paradox, the Claims of Theory (Duke UP, 2022). (Anker holds a joint appointment in Cornell's law school and its Department of Literature in English.) I can say just two things for certain about this difficult book: a) I didn't understand two consecutive sentences, and b) it's not about literature, not even tangentially. In fact, I'm not sure what it's about -- as far as I can tell, it's not about the law. I have rarely attempted anything in English prose that I found quite so impenetrable. I never even grasped what Anker means by paradox.

I'm sure it's mea maxima culpa, but so be it. 

 

[April 4] PGB writes: "Every time you post something, it becomes ever clearer that you're not the right person for this investigation. Give it up and stick to something within your abilities, like basketball. You write well on basketball. Do yourself a favor: stay away from the deeper issues that Anker discusses."

[April 4]  Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Perhaps you're right, PGB (whoever you are). The shoemaker should stick to his last. This Anker book is not intended for me, but I I wonder for whom it is intended. It's got to be an extremely small specialized audience. Six or eight people, worldwide. I doubt anyone on Cornell's English faculty then or now could make heads or tails of it."

[April 6]  Artie Greengroin writes: "Thanks for hanging in there.  I hope you find other Cornell English Professors who know how to write English. I'm not optimistic, though. BTW, I think PGB is harshing on you, but I agree that your basketball essays are pretty good."

[April 8] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Thanks for the recommendation, Artie and PGB. If anyone is interested, my basketball essays are here.

[April 9]  Charles Evans (Mercer College) writes: "I agree. Vivian, your notes on basketball are quite good. But you're just not smart enough to understand philosophy."

[April 10] Joe J. Keen (Northwest Nazarene University, Nampa, Idaho) writes: "I agree with Charles Evans. The basketball entries are amusing. But, Vivian, you're no philosopher."

[April 16] Vivian de St. Vrain writes: The "Artie Greengroin" who posted on April 6 does not exist. Artie Greengroin is not a real person; he's a character invented by the WWII novelist Harry Brown. Come on, Artie you can use your real name. Don't be afraid. Don't hide behind a pseudonym. We're all friends here."

[April 30]. Chester Bacon writes: "Thanks for bringing the Hutchinson book to my attention.  I've read and been enlightened by it. But following your recommendation I'll stay away from the Anker book. And I do like your basketball essays."

Driftin'

Every once in a while, I experience something that I call a "cultural convergence" -- perhaps an event reported in a daily newspaper that closely resembles something on the very page of the novel that I happen to be reading. A cross-genre overlap, let us say.

Here's in example of such a coincidence that amused me much.  

Yesterday evening I watched the classic western The Magnificent Seven (1960) and this morning I read, once again, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. It's hard to believe but yes, there is a very brief moment where two such very distinct works brush against one another.  

Unlike TN, The Magnificent Seven is a violent spectacle that steers clear of humor, or subtle characterization or extensive dialogue. After the climactic concluding battle to preserve the Mexican village has been both lost and won, the two surviving gunmen share a moment before trotting off on their separate ways. Chris Adams (Yul Brynner) inquires of Vin Tanner (Steve McQueen) if he has a plan for what comes next. Laconic Vin, cowpoke and gunslinger, responds, "driftin'. 

In Twelfth Night, there's a similar question and a similar answer, but in a far different idiom. Antonio asks Sebastian, who has survived a shipwreck, about his plans. Sebastian's view of his future is essentially the same as Vin's, but there is none of that "ah shucks" minimalism in his reply. Instead, Sebastian responds, "My determinate voyage is mere extravagancy."  

[While Vin's one-word answer is clear as clear can be, Sebastian's "mere extravagancy" requires a bit of a gloss. Nowadays, "extravagancy" (usually "extravagance") signifies a "lack of restrain in purchasing luxury goods." Not so in 1600, when "extravagant" remained much closer to its root etymological inheritance. The word descends from L. vagare, "to wander." Extra-vagance therefore means something like "wander beyond." Here's a more familiar example of the word at work: when Roderigo characterizes Othello as an "extravagant and wheeling stranger," he does not criticize Othello for spending too many ducats on his fancy get-up. He means that he's a rootless and wandering non-native. (Wheeling? my dictionary glosses wheeling as "roving, wandering, drifting"). And also: "mere" did not then connote triviality; its meaning is closer to "pure." "Determinate" meant and still means "decided.")

Therefore Sebastian's sentence --"My determinate voyage is mere extravagancy" -- is directly equivalent to  Vin's "driftin''". Cultural convergence at its best.

It's just two ways of talkin'. 

I sometimes wonder about Shakespeare's intent here. Why did he bother to put such a difficult sentence in Sebastian's mouth? For purposes of characterization, certainly. But at the expense of clarity. Wouldn't it have been more economical, more transparent, for Sebastian to say something plain, such as "I don't have a plan, I'll just wander." It's certain that some percentage of Shakespeare's audience, perhaps most, will not grasp the meaning  of the sentence as written and will be left puzzled. Yet as he so often does, Shakespeare preferred eloquence to transparency. 

In my opinion, Shakespeare delighted in his own fluency.  And sometimes I think that Shakespeare wasn't just writing to be heard by his Globe or Blackfriars audience. He was writing to be read and studied --  although I doubt he could have imagined a future in which his sentences would be glossed with crowded inches of small-type footnotes.

It it possible that Shakespeare also had an inkling that, as Beethoven once put it, he was writing for "a latter age?"

It's Big! We're Little!

Can it possibly be true that the universe as we know it is becoming larger and larger? The more we learn, the more it seems to expand. The scientists who know about such things now brag that the Milky Way numbers between 200 and 300 billion stars, nearly all of which are probably circled by planets. Moreover, these same experts now claim that there are something like one or two trillion such configurations -- some of them small but most larger than our own personal galaxy. And to top all that, there's a rumor circulating that our universe might be just one of an untold, possibly infinite number of other universes. Some of them Big Banging, some expanding, some collapsing.

These numbers are staggering and incomprehensible, at least to me. I can't even get a hold of a million of anything, even grains of sand, let alone a billion (a thousand million!) enormous stars.

Now they tell me that our universe began 13.8 billion years ago, more or less, and will go on for a hundred billion more. That's another very large number for me (or you) to assimilate. 

It's all mighty perplexing. And then let me add the toughest question of all: why is there something rather than nothing? Yes, why is that? How come?

There are some who find this sort of information dismaying because it confirms the triviality, the meaninglessness of our individual lives. How can I possibly worry about last night's insomnia or my latest nosebleed -- or indeed my very own life -- in a world of a gazillion planets, stars, ultramassive black holes, neutron stars, galaxies, and a universe which may have no discernible boundary or beginning or ending.

Yet I myself find all this information not dismaying but comforting - maybe even inspiring.

What are the odds that a planet might support life? Very small. And that the planet's precarious lifeforms would evolve for a couple of billions of years and then generate intelligent life?  And that a million years of mating and surviving by various evolving primitive and then recognizable humans might lead to my ancestors -- and that after thousands of lucky matings eventually resolve into my parents Manny and Lil who happened upon the precise instant to beget Me. And that I, in the second half of my 80s, way past my shelf life, would still be here to enjoy these extra innings.

All this work of creation and evolution and luck to culminate in Me.  

It's a miracle of cosmic proportions and should be hosannahed. Here I am, enjoying my still functioning brain. My stomach is mellow after a full meal and my skin is glowing from a stroll in the warm sun. At the end of the day, I will crawl under the covers with my bedmate and ladylove. Truly the stars have aligned to my benefit.

Nor let us not underestimate  the consummate joy of mattress and blanket.

My assemblage of molecules has had a great run -- much more than could be reasonably anticipated.  Soon my molecules will disassemble and then reassemble into someone else. I'm very glad to contribute to this phenomenon. 

But if so -- if we are so fortunate, as I believe us to be, why don't we as a people celebrate our good fortune? Take pleasure in our lives. What's the need for this continuing strife and wars and enslavements and genocides? What's the point of it? We're all sitting here, billions of us, for a second or so in an infinitely boundless and timeless universe. Why must half of us make life miserable for the other half? Why can't all we just get along?

Truly we are a horrid species.

I wonder whether other planets that support intelligent life have done any better. I hope so.

Words of My Life -- Text

I first encountered the word "text" -- as did everyone else of my cohort -- as the first component of "textbook." At P S 217, textbooks were issued on the first day of school. Then, later in the day, we ritually scissored brown paper grocery bags and improvised protective book covers. It was not unusual for the covers to be in better shape than the retirement-eligible books. At college, I was surprised to find that I was required to purchase my own textbooks -- a discovery that busted a hole in my precarious budget. 

And then the word "text" sat still for a number of years until it emerged as a term of art in critical theory. "Text" became a generic word for anything written: novels, poems, plays, signs, advertising slogans, tattoos -- anything that could be analyzed and discussed. I think, in retrospect, that the idea was not to "privilege" one form of writing over another. "Text" is to poem as "provider" is to doctor.

Nowadays, "text" has emerged from the gloom of academic criticism and has become the most frequently used of words. Who could have predicted it? I myself, formerly a writer of letters and postcards and until recently of emails, and for many years at one point a user of the telephone, now send and receive multiple "texts" in a day.

The noun has also acquired a variety of verb forms: "I'll text you"; "I texted you";   "Text me when you arrive"; "Talk to you later.  I'm texting."

All derived, ultimately, from L. texere textus, to weave; or textor, a weaver.

The use of "text" in religious ceremony, as in a cleric's, "today's text is..." has never been a part of my life.

Cornell English Then and Now -- 5

Elisha Cohn is an associate professor in Cornell's Department of Literatures in English. Her Still Life, Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (2016) strikes me as two books in one. The first is quite lovely and filled with a variety of splendid apercus. Cohn explores "lyric moments" in the novels (confession: I read closely only the chapter on Thomas Hardy, the novelist with whom I'm most familiar). She observes that Hardy (a poet as well as a novelist) occasionally stops the progress of the story and allows his characters to experience a moment of stasis or reflection or reverie that is more a characteristic of lyric poetry than prose. I was much impressed by her analyses of these moments -- and wondered why I had failed to notice such events -- or non-events -- myself. So criticism did what it's supposed to do -- widens our understanding and appreciation of works of literature. I returned to the Victorian novel armed with a new way of seeing. In fact, I'm now reading Little Dorrit again for the express purpose of ascertaining whether a non-poet like Dickens employs the same Still Life method. So far, not the case -- Dickens has his own particular (and very successful) methods of expanding the consciousness of his characters.

Ah, but then there's the other side of Cohn's book which attempts to develop her useful insights within the slough of "theory." I half suspect that Cohn felt obliged to make herself relevant or contemporary or tenure-worthy with her tumble into this quicksand -- but perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps she devoutly believes in an apparatus that I find so incomprehensible and transient. In this second part of the book, many famous names are invoked and admired; some of these are very French and very revered; others  are merely professors at American universities. Pages of text and footnotes defend against the horrid possibility that Still Life might be "insufficiently theorized." And in these speculative paragraphs Cohn discusses the deprivilegization of hierarchical thought in favor of forms of lateralization in which individuations are impersonal and singularities are pre-individual and which reterritorialize along the lines of preexisting structures of power which re-consolidate into static concepts, etc., etc. Which is when I either descend into a reverie (or nightmare) of my own or hurl he book across the room.

 

[February 23  Audrey ap Howell writes:  "Vivian de St. Vrain, you've go it wrong. The notion that there are poetic moments in the novels is well established. The originality of this book lies in its theorizing of these moments. You would know this if you had read carefully and not skimmed." 

[February 24] J C Occhiogrosso writes: "This is a well-written book. Complicated but not obscure."

[February 25]  Reuben Musgrave writes:  "I bet that Cohn is a delightful teacher -- if she keeps to the events in the novels and stays away from bewildering 'theory.'"

[February 25] Savannah Courtermanche writes:  "All novelists pause the plot for moments of reflection. Nothing new here."    

[March 5]  Joy Jourgenson writes:  "This difficult monograph would have been more useful as a series of short, insightful essays.  Too bad it had to be expanded into a repetitive static book. Not the author's fault -- just the tune of the times."

[March 6]  Eli Munn writes:  "Vivian, you're too old and out of it to have an opinion worth anything. Shut it down and go back to your knitting."

[March 15] Rogers Roggen writes:  "I wonder, Vivian, how you can work yourself up into such a snit about Cornell when the USA is going to hell in a handbasket. Shouldn't you put your effort into more pressing matters."

[March 18] Homer vanNess writes:  "Reuben Musgrave, are you possibly the "Cousin Rube" that I heard my parents mention? I know there's a Musgrave branch to my family. (I found your name doing a random googlesearch). If you are Cousin Rube, could you pm me at [email protected]. I'd love to hear from you. I think you went to Cornell; so did I but much later."

 

Gravestones

I've never visited my parents' graves. I don't even know where they are buried. I've been told that my father is buried between my mother and his sister Mollie, but I don't know where they lie. I have a paper that tells me where my sister Susan, who died as an infant, is buried, but I've never been there. I don't know where my brother Eugene lies.

I know exactly where Althea and Phyllis are buried -- just up the hill, under the big maple. I visit once a year and bring a stone to place on their markers. Phyllis's is a bronze plaque affixed to a stone; Althea's is just the capital letter A and her dates (1939-2016). It's what she wanted.  

Dan Goss is buried in Staten Island somewhere. I visited once, with Althea. A's mother, Grandma Anne, wanted her ashes divided in half and spread, part with Phyllis and part with Dan.  She has no gravestone, nor wanted one.

I have told my family that I want my tombstone to read, "No more insomnia, forever." But that's a joke.  

Nowadays it's the custom to scatter the ashes on a favorite place, which is nice, but there's no place to visit. Especially no place for those buried at sea.

On the Mall

After a severe cold snap, it's a welcome warm Friday afternoon. We're on the semi-famous mall enjoying a long-postponed promenade. A woman, in her seventies, stops us. "Can you help me?" I'm embarrassed to confess that my first reaction to her plea was that she must be one of our many panhandlers. But not so. She continued: "It's my husband, he has Parkinson's, can you help me get him to the car?" He, Bill, was standing frozen, unable to speak, unable to move, his balance precarious. "Two years ago," she said,"he was robust. He's having a bad day." And indeed he was. I took Bill's left arm under the shoulder, his wife the other arm. Lynn grasped my left hand and carried Bill's useless stick, and together we shuffled him infinitely slowly and gently to the curb. "I thought we could go out for coffee," she said, "but I was wrong." While we stood quietly, Bill's wife went to fetch their car which was parked only fifty feet away. She backed it to where we stood (Lynn now supporting Bill on his right side). We helped Bill into passenger seat. His wife buckled him in.

I asked her, "do you have help?'  "Yes, she said, "friends." "Do you have children?" "Yes, but they don't live nearby." She thanked us generously and drove off.

I was sad for both him and her. He, because his dreadful disease is going to kill him very soon. And she, because her life now consists of morning-to-night care taking -- in bed, out of bed; dressing and undressing; into a comfortable chair for a while and then and out of it; brief awkward walks; three times a day lifting the spoon to his lips. And what's known in the care taking trade as "toileting."

I'm convinced that she doesn't know how bad he is. Caretakers are always behind, always catching up. If she knew, she'd have had a wheelchair at the ready. He needs constant care-- not just family or friends, but professional assistance. Can they afford a place in a memory care facility or nursing home? Not everyone can.

Afterward the incident, we went to a coffee shop -- a normalizing activity for us. But, sitting there, I was shaken. Certainly profound sadness for the ill husband and the encumbered wife, and in addition a touch of personal PTSD. 

And then the inevitable pondering. "To this favor must we come." It's not just Bill. We're all doomed -- even that cute infant in the next booth, rapturously examining her fingertips. A host of diseases, some as bad as Parkinson's, waiting at the door, waiting.

Cornell English Then and Now: 3B

I'm still trying to come to terms with Laura Brown's book, The Counterhuman Imaginary. I've wrestled the title to a draw, and now I'm going to take a crack at the Introduction. Is this task a good use of my limited time?

Let me quote a sentence that I take to be the very heart of the book and the heart of the problem. It's a doozy.

"Human story telling is found to provide a subtle scenario for affirming the other-than-human, based on an imputed commonality that replaces human priority with cross-species inclusivity that transcends the human." 

Laura Brown's prose reads as if it were first drafted in German and then rendered into English by Google Translate.  

It takes effort, but once you penetrate its peculiar idiom, it makes a kind of sense. For those of my readers who are still with me, let me try to parse this sentence. I suspect It may mean something like, "human beings project thoughts and feelings onto animals and objects."

"Human story telling" [that is, literature]

"is found to provide" [the passive "is found," should be deleted even though it functions as a compliment to the person (i.e. the author herself) to whom this insight has been revealed.]

"a subtle scenario" [I don't know exactly what the phrase "subtle scenario" means; nor do I think that anyone else does.] 

"based on an imputed commonality " [I understand "commonality" because I know that humans and animals share many features. I don't see the necessity for the word 'imputed"; imputed by whom? who other than humans can "impute."] 

"that replaces human priority" [i.e. there should be no preference for humans over animals and rocks, despite the paradox that humans and not animals can think about the equivalence.] 

"with cross-species inclusivity" ["inclusivity" is implicit in the previous rejection of "human priority." Wow, these abstract nouns do pile up (commonality, priority, inclusivity). Suggested simplification: "that includes other species"]

"that transcends the human.]. Transcends, in this final clause, smuggles into the argument a new idea, because "to transcend" means "to surpass." The claim now, as this snake of a sentence winds its weary way to conclusion, is that the meaning that humans attach to things is greater than the humans who do the attaching. At least I think that is what it may mean.]

So after completing this investigation, I think that the claim is that literature projects ideas onto animals and also things. And sometimes these projections illuminate and enhance both things and animals. 

I'm exhausted. I had planned to discuss the Introduction at greater length, but I've had enough. Instead of proceeding with the introduction, I'm going to try to understand the chapter on Robinson Crusoe (a novel that I first read as a boy and have read several times since, and which I feel that I understand). Stay tuned.

 

 

[January 31]  Petal Rivera writes:  "So it seems that Brown's book is not a novelty of ideas, but a novelty of language."

[January 31] Sean R. Fine writes: "I agree with Ms. Rivera. Simple ideas cast in pretentious language to make them seem important. This emperor of literary criticism has no clothes. None whatsoever,"

[February 1] Joel Salzberg writes: "Vivian, good job of unravelling that sentence even though I still don't quite understand it."

{February 1] Viola Pilbeam writes: "Vivian, you're too kind. Why don't you just  admit that this whole book is absurd American nonsense."

[February 4] Helena Hotchkiss-Jones replies: "This absurdity can't be blamed on the Americans. It's as much the fault of Deleuze, Adorno, etc."]

[February 4] Joel Salzberg replied: "Who is Deleuze Adorno?" 

[May 2]  Evelyn Efflandt writes: "Joel, you always were a couple of candles shy of a menorah."

[May 3] Vivian de St.Vrain replies: "Evelyn, you always were a nasty bigot."

Cornell English Then and Now -- 3A

I am absolutely buffaloed by Laura Brown's book, The Counterhuman Imaginary (Cornell UP, 2023).

The title is a puzzle. Why does the adjective come after the noun? And what does the word "counterhuman" mean?  (One hundred and forty-six pages to go and I'm already off balance. I'm worried that if I can't understand the title I'm going to have a heck of a difficult time with the content.)

I took a guess that the coinage "counterhuman" would signify something monstrous or terrifying, like a vampire, troll or ogre. But I was not even in the ballpark. "Counterhuman," I have now discovered, is a term of art in contemporary literary criticism that refers to everything that is not human: not only animals, natural phenomena such as storms and earthquakes, but also "things" or objects -- anything that is constructed or manufactured. Not "inhuman' -- just not human. (But why "counter" rather than "non" human?)

Moreover, the word "imaginary," which I have for a lifetime understood to be an adjective signifying what is not material but rather a product of the human mind, as for example, art and literature and dreams, has also undergone metamorphosis. According to wiki, the adjective-turned-noun "imaginary" "is the set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols common to a particular social group and the corresponding society through which people imagine their social whole.” That's a deal of territory, but I think I understand: "imaginary" is essentially a synonym for what I might, naively, have called "culture." (Might an alternative to The Counterhuman Imaginary be The Culture of Things? It's a more inviting title and much less pretentious.)

But now I'm stopped in my tracks. The "imaginary, it appears, is "the work of a particular social group." How in the world, then, do the "counterhuman," who are incapable of thought, possibly generate "a structure of ideas?" Pots and pans and volcanoes and marmosets don't have brains that think or speak, except when we humans attribute such traits to them. 

In a whimsical moment, Duke Senior, in As You Like It, proposed that there are "tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones." Am I to understand that this author takes seriously what Shakespeare regarded as an ironic jokey extravagance? Gosh, I hope not.

I think I now get the point: Laura Brown, the prestigious Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell University, intends to defend a paradox. She will explain to me how non-humans, things without an intelligence, can create a culture. I'd better pay close attention. Or perhaps the author means to advance the trivial but more sensible and less sensational idea that humans can attribute culture to animals and things.

Nevertheless, I must say what's on my mind -- what a deliberately off-putting title. It's clearly designed to repel the general reader, someone like myself, and to speak only to coterie fellow-travelers who might understand either or both of the words "counterhuman" and "imaginary." Not a large potential audience.

Do I have a chip on my shoulder as I turn from the title to the Introduction. Yes, I believe I do.

 

[January 25] Marianne Morrison, Ph.D. writes:  "Vivian, you should not go on with this. Your so prejudiced against this writer that you cant give her a fair hearing."

[January 25] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Marianne, I'm trying my best to be fair and honest."

[January 26] Petal Rivera writes: "Vivian, I think you're naive to suggest a less pretentious title. I hate to say it, but the point is not to avoid pretense, but to be pretentious. No modesty in this book."

[January 27] J C Occhiogrosso writes:  "Vivian, you're being deliberately obtuse. C'mon, it's not so difficult."

[February 4] Vivian de St. Vrain responds:  "Ok, J C, if it's so easy, why don't you suggest a better title."

[February 12] Winifred A. Walker writes: "Like it or not, this is typical academic jargon. If you want to read this book, you must master the idiom."]

Cornell English Then and Now -- 1

Here's a truth that blows my freakin' mind: since I earned my B. A. in English from Cornell University in 1960, sixty-five years have come and gone. Glaciers have melted and rivers have changed their course since, way back when, in a prior millennium, I was first introduced to serious literature -- to Chaucer and Milton and George Eliot.

My professors in those far-away-and-long-ago days were exclusively male and for the most part veterans of WW2 or the Korean war. They wrote definitive scholarly articles for the Philological Quarterly or for Modern Philology; they published learned monographs on canonical poets and novelists; and they taught courses with such forthright titles as The Seventeenth Century and Wordsworth and Coleridge. Although I was an indifferent student before I arrived at Cornell, I found an intellectual home in the Department of English. Inasmuch as I did not have a brain for rigorous science or for the tough analytic philosophy that was then in fashion, I was fortunate that the work of English suited my limited abilities -- curiosity, patience, a good memory, and something of a feel for language.

Just yesterday (and what, pray tell, prompted me?), I took a peek at the current website of Cornell's English Department. (In the index-card 1950s, when the manual typewriter was the acme of technology, the word "website" would have signified a dark corner colonized by spiders.) Even at first glance, the 2025 Cornell website said to me "very very different, very 'now'." While an occasional word or phrase was recognizable, it was the novelty -- the modernity, I guess -- that flared from the electronic page and dazzled mine eyne. Time marches on, no doubt, but whether it marches boldly forward or plunges over a cliff remains to be established.  

First of all, it's no longer the Department of English. It's now, hurrah!, the "Department of Literatures in English." What a welcome redefinition -- an assertion that English is a world language and that it houses a world literature. Nowadays, if I sit down with a work of fiction, I'm just as likely to read a novel by a writer from Africa or India or Australia as one from the British isles or North America. There's not a reason in the world why Chinua Achebe or Abdulrazak Gurnah should not be studied in an English Department. I respect this shift in focus and I regret that my 1950s Beowulf-to-T. S. Eliot English department was so parochial, so provincial. I can only admire the fact that the Department of Literatures in English has annexed to itself whole continents of writing -- a case of academic imperialism that this time seems wholly right and just.

The website also reveals that, in a nation in which the study of the humanities in higher education is at risk, Cornell's English is a huge thriving enterprise. There are fifty-one people on permanent staff, almost all of professorial rank. Of this number, twenty-seven -- or slightly more than half -- are women. And among those pictured on the site, a significant number are "of color." Undoubtedly, the present department is a far more representative collection of individuals than my 1950s faculty. Moreover, the chair, the associate chair, the director of undergraduate studies, the director of graduate students, and the director of writing are all women. It may once have been the case that the occasional female interloper was a token for display only, but not so now.

And what do these handsome and distinguished men and women study? Fortunately for me, members of the faculty list their areas of concentration. Most claim two or three specialties, some as many as five; a few recalcitrant individuals list none, leaving me to wonder whether they are polymaths or just ornery uncooperative academics. Among the fifty-one, the single expertise most commonly claimed is "cultural studies." This preponderance set me back a bit, because "cultural studies" is not a term I recognize nor one that existed, as far as I know, in the 1950s, when the word "culture" was synonymous with "civilization" -- sometimes just Western Civilization -- and when "cultured" meant something equivalent to "educated" and possibly even "socially established." But now, apparently, "cultural studies" is, and I quote a respected source, "an academic field  that... investigates how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power. These include ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender." Am I correct, and is it possible, for me to infer from this litany of nouns that "cultural practices" comprehends just about everything that we as a society say or do? Clearly the Department of Literatures in English lays claim to a heck of a lot of intellectual territory -- and that it is a far more aggressive entity than is revealed by its mere absorption of Anglophone novels. I was initially suspicious of these extensive claims, but after reflecting a while I recognized that, if I set to one side the self-aggrandizing listing of ideology, ethnicity, class... etc,), cultural studies may in practice simply bring to the forefront such elements as imperialism and nationhood in Robinson Crusoe or race and gender in Othello. Wouldn't it be comforting if "cultural studies" is at least in part merely traditional wine in spiffy new bottles? I, for one, certainly hope so.

After cultural studies, it is "literary theory" that claims the largest group of adherents -- thirteen, or about a quarter of the faculty. This revelation surprised me because I would have guessed that "theory" had long since gone the way of the aurochs and the mouflon. "Theory" had its herd of enthusiasts in its obscurantist heyday in the last century, yet it seems to be alive and kicking at Cornell -- but only, I suspect, as a vestigial remnant of an earlier time and only among the more senior members of the Department.

Following "theory" in popularity among the professoriate are the seven members who stake their claim to "gender studies." Six other say "African-American." The nine who announce a specialty in creative writing may not know that they are the successors and the beneficiaries of the late revered Professor James McConkey. Not a single member of the faculty offers "Shakespeare" or "Milton" as an area of expertise. I do not doubt that the study of gender and African-American and Asian-American literatures is a good thing, but I would have wished that the authors of the finest works of art in all of Anglophonia be accorded equivalent attention and status.   

Would a reincarnated Youthful Me elect take a degree from such a faculty?  I'm skeptical, but I can't say for sure because I don't know whether or not, in the classroom, the scrupulous examination of literature and ideas has been undermined by transitory and faddish ideologies. I must confess that the biases of the website make me feel old and wary and out of touch. And tired.

Well then, what does take place in the classroom?

Let's sample some evidence.

In days of yore, I enrolled in "Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama," a course taught by the distinguished scholar and teacher David Novarr. The course was organized as a chronological march from Kyd and Marlowe in the 1580s right through to Ford and Massinger -- the last playwrights of significance before the theaters went dark in 1642. I remember savoring some delightful comedies by Ben Jonson and Francis Beaumont and also a couple of ferociously brilliant tragedies by Thomas Middleton -- writings, I suspect, that 2020s English majors are not destined to encounter -- even though an acquaintance with these plays is essential background for understanding the timeless works of Shakespeare.  

There's no equivalent course in the present curriculum, but there is an analogue, and it appears in the catalogue of offerings thusly: 

ENGL 3240. Blood Politics:  Comparative Renaissance Drama

Blood is everywhere. From vampire shows to video games, our culture seems to be obsessed with it. The course examines the power of "blood" in the early modern period as a figure that continues to capture our imagination, not only as a marker of racial, religious, and sexual difference and desire, but also as a dramatic player in its own right. How does a politics of blood appear on stage when populations are being expelled and colonized for reasons (mis)understood in terms of blood?.... Topics include honor, revenge, purity, the body, sexuality, conversion, and death.

The course description itself is a mess -- both incomprehensible and meretricious. I'm shocked by the catchpenny pandering. Do 2020s teachers need to lure students into their classrooms with "vampires" and "videos?" The assertion that "blood is a dramatic player in its own right" is nonsense. The description reads like advertising copy for a cheesy low-budget horror flick playing at some louche all-night grind house.

Moreover, "blood" isn't "everywhere." Goodness gracious!

I'm afraid that these entrancing plays are doomed to be put through the "cultural studies" homogenizer. Or "theorized" out of all compass.

Ah, well.

Back in 1960, I had a summer job in Ithaca and therefore happened to be loafing around the campus when the University hosted its returning alumni. Among the returnees were the old folks  -- some few of them members of the class of 1895 -- who had walkered and wheel-chaired to their Sixty-Fifth. Geezers, I thought. It's sobering to realize that those codgers were the same age -- 86 -- as I am now. Should I  return to Ithaca this coming spring, for my very own Sixty-Fifth, I will be perceived by the young 'uns exactly as I observed those Class of 1895 guys: as ancient and irrelevant.

It follows, therefore, that my reservations about the 2025 English curriculum have their exact parallel in the 1895ers perspective on my 1960 curriculum. It's not hard to imagine that they -- I mean the members of the class of 1895 -- who had been educated in elocution and Old Norse, would have been shocked and perhaps outraged by the 1950s "modern" curriculum that I found so enticing and illuminating.

And now, because I don't want to go full curmudgeon and become the kind of superannuated guy who shakes his ebony stick at the modern world and deplores the decline of civilization, I'm going to make an effort to find out what's really going on in 2025. I have therefore set myself the task of reading a representative sample of the books written by members of the present-day English faculty.

I'll report on my studies right here.

Stay tuned.

[January 18] Bernhard Starr writes:  "Vivian, you are right about the course description. It's a disgrace. It's badly written and ridiculous. Why didn't you include the name of the prof. who wrote it?  He/she needs to be exposed. What "populations are being expelled and colonized" by Volpone or The Changeling?  And did you look other course descriptions -- are they equally silly?  What's worst about the course description is that it doesn't respect the plays that the class is going to examine. They're not important interesting dramas to the teacher -- they're just fodder for an ideology. 

[January 19] Vivian de St. Vrain replies: "Mr. Starr, I didn't identify the author of the course description because the website doesn't identify him/her. Just as well. Also, I didn't read other course descriptions though I might do so in the future. I think you're correct that the course description does not respect the dramas or their authors. Which is, as you suggest, mighty disappointing." 

[January 19] Bernhard Starr replies:  "I think I'd rather study Old Norse."

[February 4] Thurston Dale replies:  "I guess I'm a geezer, too (Cornell, '65). I'm glad I majored in English before criticism turned crazy. Great teachers -- Mizener, Abrams, Parrish, Novarr."

[March 17] Anatole Miles Webber writes: "Vivian, you were naive back in the 1950s and you're still naive now. You assume that the Cornell English Department of your youth, 65 years ago, was normative and normal. You were then and still are oblivious to the fact that the Department's 1950 curriculum was the product of stress and change and compromise. Try to remember that there were at least three forces at work and that various faculty members had various degrees of commitment to them. The first group was the oldest -- the traditionalist who studied, as they had always done, literature as history and biography and philology. Get the text and the context right was their primary concern. Then there were the 'new critics" -- heirs to Leavis and Scrutiny in England and the southern agrarians (Ransom, Tate, Warren) in the US. But the main intellectual current riling English Departments were the fierce critics out of New York (mostly Jewish) circles (Kazin, Trilling, Fiedler, Paul Goodman, Irving Howe, etc). In retrospect, even though Cornell brought both Lionel Trilling and Cleanth Brooks to Ithaca during your and my years there, the new winds made little impression on our education. Cornell was peaceful, isolated and non-ideological. It appears from your writing that you preferred it that way and still do. It was stable until the theory people brought in novelty and confusion and excitement.

[April 15] Parnell Pratt replies: "And also monumental pretension. And eventual collapse and failure."

[May 3] Lance Birdseye (Lt., USAF) writes: "What a funny website this is. Hey, folks, join the real world."

 

Books I Read, 2024

Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls; Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep; Felipe Alou, My Baseball Journey; Guy de la Bedoyere, Gladius, the World of the Roman Soldier; Gordon Dee Alcorn, Owls; Martin H. Levinson, Brooklyn Boomer; J.N. Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin Language; Sybille Haynes, Etruscan Civilization, a Cultural History; Philip Freeman, Julian, Rome's Last Pagan Emperor; G & L Bonfante, The Etruscan Language, An Introduction; Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories; Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons; Ellen Gilchrist, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams; Kim Chernin, In My Mother's House; Ines Augrain Thomas, Memoirs of an 84 Year Old; Louise Penny, The Cruelest Month; Abramovitch and Galvin, Jews of Brooklyn; Helen Czerski, The Blue Machine, How the Ocean Works; Ian Buruma, Spinoza, Freedom's Messiah; Robert Leighton, Tarquinia, an Etruscan City; Joseph B. Solodow, Latin Alive; William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, Barry S Brown, La Signora Watson e I Segreti di Parkington Manor; Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli; Patrick Joyce, Remembering peasants, a personal history of a vanished world; Charles Darwin, Origin of Species (parts); Sean Sayers, The Making of a Marxist Philosopher, Leo Tolstoi, Anna Karenina; David Gibbins, The History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks; Lisa Kaltenegger, Alien Earths; Nicholas Kristof, Chasing Hope; William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing; Abdulrazak Gurnah, Other Lives; Mollie Gillen, The Masseys; Hibl & Hibl, The Handel Lamps Book;  William Shakespeare, King Lear; Caroline Dodds Pennock, On Savage Shores; Andrew Lipman, Squanto, a Native Odyssey; Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd; Lee Siegel, Groucho Marx; Ben Goldfarb, Eager, the Surprising Secret Life of Beavers; Robert Louis Stevenson, The Lantern Bearers and other Essays; Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness; Margarette Lincoln, London and the 17th Century; Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending; Mark Kurlansky, The Basque History of the World.

Deaths, 2024

The year got off to an early start when Brad Gombas died on December 16. Brad was the brother of my late brother-in-law Allen Gombas. I knew him in the 1970s, when he was a young man; he lived most of his life in New Mexico where he established a career as a builder and craftsman. I wasn't in touch except through the extended family communication chain. On December 26, my friend since  1965 Ray Pike died at age 90. Ray was an accomplished journalist. Nancy Pike and AGP were the young mothers in a playgroup that included the infants NGP and Nina Pike -- in an earlier life it now seems. We saw Ray and Nancy at least once a year for many decades. Then on the last day of the year Sue Palmer died (peacefully, I'm told), after many many years of illness and pain. She was a superbly talented artist and a friend, though not a close one, since 1969. In February, we lost Nancy Levitt. Not a close friend (wife of a colleague) but a long time acquaintance  -- a regular at the Takacs, seated just in front of us these past 30 years. Sheldon "Spike" Cohen, later Alan Mills, a friend from the PS 217 schoolyard, died in March. Esophogeal cancer that had metastasized. A long drawn out death, with many months of hospice care. In May. Bill Wood died. He was a world-famous scientist and a friend. It must be 20 years now since his wife, Renate Wood, a poet, left us. Bill had been in a relationship with another old acquaintance, Marilyn Krysl, for these many years. Marilyn died a couple of months after Bill; she had been in "memory care" for several months. During the summer, we lost two former English colleagues. The first to go was congenial Chuck Squier, at the age of 91, who had moved to Boise, Idaho to be near his children; he was a friend and also a long time neighbor on the Hill; the second: nice guy Doug Burger. In August I discovered that Anatol Anton had died earlier in the year. I knew Anatol when he was a member of the CU Department of Philosophy in the 70s or 80s, but hadn't been in touch since he left Boulder to return to San Francisco. Anatol was a cheerful bear of a man, far to  the political left, who grew up in Greenwich Village with a semi-famous painter for a father. Fred Litto, classmate from P S 217 and Erasmus, died in Brazil, where he had lived for 50 years; we always planned to get together, but it never happened. Another PS 217 friend, Tony Sogluizzo, died in the spring but I didn't find out about it until much later. He was a genuinely decent and gentle man who had a good career as a librarian. Late in December, we attended the dignified funeral of Bill Belew, husband of Lynn's friend Sharon Belew.  And so the year came to an end.  

 

Another Creative Dream

I'm aware that Oscar Wilde is reputed to have said that the most terrifying words in the English language are -- "I would like to tell about you my dream."  But I'm going to report on last night's dream anyway, because it's so bizarre and interesting (at least to me).

I'm sitting at a table in a restaurant with my ladylove. Actually, it's not exactly a restaurant; it's more like a nightclub of the kind that's familiar to me only from 30s films, not from real life. Small tables in a very large room, patrons wearing fancy slick clothes -- men in dark evening wear, women in shimmering white. Low chatter. Everything normal except that wandering among the tables is a giant African lion, male, with an intimidating mane and a long swishing tail. 

I say to my lady, "I don't like the looks of this. That lion could easily carry off a small child."  End of dream, or at least, end of what I remember.

Once again, it's clear that my nighttime self is far more imaginative than my pedestrian daytime self, who would never in a million years have thought to introduce a whopping big lion from the Serengeti into an ordinary restaurant. I'm not nearly so visionary. Does the dream have any meaning? An obvious interpretation is that even places safe for recreation can be dangerous.  Or, conversely, that dangers can be domesticated and made safe. Take your pick. 

My Life with Museums -- an Introduction

In the course of my long life, I've visited hundreds of museums -- more than I can possibly count or remember. Nor just the famous and glorious ones: how many times, driving in unfamiliar locality, or wandering in a new city, have I been irresistibly lured into the local landmark?  Even in the most modest establishment, there's something new to learn and discover. Nevertheless, my focus, lifetime, has been on art museums, where even the most iconic, most reproduced painting or sculpture acquires new life when viewed in the flesh. Let's face it: copies can be useful and informative, but the real thing is the real thing -- always revelatory, and sometimes transcendent or sublime. In fact, let me confess, in the Rembrandt Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, I experienced a transient version of the so-called Stendhal Syndrome. Once and once only, but never to be forgotten.

I'm dazzled, in memory, by the vast holdings of the Borghese, the Louvre, the Rijksmuseum, the British Museum, and an early love, the under-appreciated Brooklyn Museum right there on Grand Army Plaza.  

I'm grateful to the exhibitions and the hard-working curators that introduced me to major painters I wouldn't otherwise have appreciated: Aelbert Cuyp and Jan Steen at the National Gallery, Camille Pissarro at the Jewish Museum in New York; many more. And also the specialized museums, chief among them the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, which taught me more about life in the seventeenth century than could a fleet of books. And a special favorite, the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York -- a most wonderful and comprehensive display of an ancient and modern craft. But also the many local museums that I visited during my thirty-eight cross-country migrations. Who could ever forget the Donna Reed Museum in Denison, Ohio, or the Jell-O Museum somewhere near Buffalo, New York?  Gosh, I'm still hoping that someday I will make it to the National Museum of the American Coverlet in Bedford, Pennsylvania.

And then there are the troubling museums. I wonder if I will ever have the courage to enter the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. It was disorienting enough to visit an open-air museum, somewhere in Lithuania, where a variety of preserved structures from that country's miserable past have been brought together to simulate a peasant village. It was a strange dispiriting visit. After all, my ancestors as far back as we can know lived and worked in such a sad little village. My visit was, I suppose, educational -- but also melancholy and depressing. The village seemed not so much preserved as embalmed.

Sleeping: a History

I'm a terrible, terrible sleeper. It's a lifelong plight and a serious disability. Truth to tell, I'd have more success as a contestant in a tango contest, or as a heldentenor yodeling in front of thousands, or as a trapeze artist or as a sumo wrestler than I have as a sleeper.

Bad sleeping runs in my family. I suppose that I inherited the trait from my father. Growing up, we never knew where we'd find the old guy in the morning, because during the night he'd wander from room to room and from bed to chair and even onto that scratchy old green tufted sofa. For me, the hardest part of any day has always been the night -- and, believe it or not, the problem has become more severe as I grapple with old age.

My usual routine is to fall asleep prematurely (and unwisely) at 10:00 pm. Then I wake at 12:30 am, usually in a fright from a ghastly nightmare, my brain alert, but my body yearning for oblivion. Then I'm up for a while, involuntarily reprising some atrocious embarrassment or shameful failure in some earlier part of my life. Unable to find the right situation for my ancient limbs, I twirl beneath the blankets like a rotisserie chicken. I don't want to disturb my peacefully-slumbering bedmate, so I wander the residence, finally to settle in an auxiliary bed. Then my wayward brain starts to ruminate on the state of the nation, especially on the prospect of a second term for the moronic demagogue. At this point, I reluctantly surrender to necessity and take a sleeping pill (the powerful hypnotic ambien). I read or watch a basketball game on the TV, but after about 45 minutes the drug takes hold and the muscles in my eyes slacken so much that I can no longer bring the separate images of right and left eye together. Eventually I fall into "airplane sleep" -- the kind of shallow surface sleep that we all experience when we fly "economy" or "coach" (better called "steerage"). At about 6 in the morning, I wake out a second horrid dream, relieve myself, and try to snatch a couple of peaceful hours --  a hope which I regularly fail to accomplish. Eventually, "the darkness has passed/ And it's daylight at last."  I'm foggy-headed for a while but at last I regain my equilibrium until it's time for another nighttime bout with Morpheus. And that's how I pass one third of my life. 

On the cheerful side, although I'm a bad nighttime sleeper, I'm a fairly proficient daytime napper. The most wonderful and memorable sleeps of my life have been afternoon naps. When I was in my teens, back there in the Eisenhower era, it was my weekend custom to trot to the schoolyard in the morning and play three-on-three half-court basketball for a couple of hours (in those days I enjoyed an endless "second wind"). Then I'd come home for a mid-day dinner -- perhaps if the parents were feeling flush it would be a roast beef or roast pork along with a bounty of potatoes (the most soporific of vegetables). Then I'd retreat to my room, tune the old wood-cased Philco to a Dodgers game, perhaps even to a double-header, and allow myself to be soothed by the rhythmic cadences of Red Barber and Connie Desmond. A deep, profound and most satisfying nap would then ensue -- the kind of sleep where you're so far gone that you don't know if it's day or night, summer or winter when, hours later, you crack an exploratory eyelid.

Where are the sleeps of yesteryear?

In my maturity, sleep has been, as I've said, a combat zone. In these last years I've achieved weekend afternoon depth just two times. Alas and alack, it was the drugs, the sedatives for my two surgeries that did the trick. When you're anesthetized, at least as I experienced it, there's nothing -- no sound, no dream, certainly no twirling -- between the moment the anesthetic kicks in and moment it leaves. You're just not there. You're nowhere.

The ancient formula was somnus imago mortis. That is to say, sleep is the simulacrum of death. Sleep is designed to prepare us for death. There was a time that I would scoff at such a pious formula -- but not any more. I think that if death is what I experienced during anesthetized sleep, why, then, there's nothing to fear. It will be peaceful and long and very boring, but not at all stressful.

I would like my tombstone to read, "No More Insomnia, Forever."

Words of My Life -- Outing

During my lifetime, the word "outing" has mutated beyond recognition. It first entered my youthful vocabulary (as did so many other words) through the medium of baseball. An "outing" -- in the old days --meant to me only a stint on the mound. "Podres has had a good "outing" today." The more general meaning of "outing" as a short trip taken for pleasure, such as a picnic, or a jaunt in the country, only came into my  life many years later. "They enjoyed a family outing to Montauk." The fact of the matter is that my family of origin didn't go on "outings," but at some point I must have heard I heard about such journeyings from friends or read about them in novels.

These days, I rarely encounter the baseball or picknicky meanings of "outing." "Outing" has transformed into the obnoxious word that describes the odious and hostile practice of exposing the sexual identity of a person against his/her will.  From picnic to nasty, alas.

Frankly, I prefer the traditional significations and activities.

My Life in Objects XIX: Bronze Door Plate

It's my newest acquisition, purchased on ebay just a couple of days ago, but already a favorite. It's a bronze door plate, very beautiful and heavy in the hand. It's inscribed PULL. It bears no manufacturers or identifying marks but the style is mighty pure Victorian. I imagine it came from a demolished once-elegant downtown department store. What the heck do I plan to do with it?  Why, it will be attached, next summer, to the old iron gate that we mounted at the entrance to the "waterfall garden." It's whimsical, of course, because while the gate helps to define the space, it guards absolutely nothing and is easily circumvented. 

If PUSH had been available I would have purchased it too. But PULL is sufficient. A plate saying NO SOLICITORS has also been proposed -- but that addition might be just a little bit of overkill (and silliness).

More on Starokonstantinov

The (website) "My Shtetl -- Jewish Towns of Ukraine" gathers information about Starokonstantinov -- "Old Constantine" -- the town from which, in 1895, my courageous grandparents emigrated to America. The site is in Russian but it can be mechanical translated into awkward but intelligible English.

Some of my friends of European extraction have been able to return to the old country villages where their families originated, but that option is not available to me. Trust me, there's no pilgrimage to Starokonstantinov in my future -- even if the town happens to survive the Russian invasion and the rockets. My grandparents did not bring to Ellis Island happy memories and nostalgia or pique my curiosity with warm fuzzy memories of their earlier years. Nevertheless, Starokonstantinov provokes my curiosity. For how many decades did my ancestors live in this so-obscure-to-me town?  How did they manage to survive?

One of the compilers of the My Shtetl website, Yevgenii Schneider, has unearthed a report on Starokonstantinov written in 1884 by a certain N. I. Zuts, a lieutenant in the 45th Azov Infantry Regiment. Why or for whom these paragraphs were written I have no idea, but some of it largely duplicates information that I have previously posted. According to Lieutenant Zuts, Starokonstantinov was founded in 1505 as the village of Kolyshchentsy in a grant from the king of Poland to one Ivan Labunsky. On January 5, 1561, Labunsky's descendants sold Kolyshchentsy to Prince Konstantin Ostrozhsky. Three months later, Ostrozhsky was permitted by the king to found a city first called Konstatinov, then Novokonstantinov, and finally in 1632 renamed Starokostiantyniv. A castle was constructed in 1571. In 1620, the city passed into the possession of the princes Zaslavsky, and in 1682, to the princes Lubomirsky. Starokonstinov became part of Russia in 1793.

(It seems to be the case that Ukraine was a largely unpopulated or underpopulated frontier until a few hundred years ago. When and why did my people decide to try their luck on this vast semi-empty plain?) 

Zuts expresses frustration that it hard to count Jews because of "the special conditions of their life, which is generally distinguished by great mobility and inconstancy with respect to place of residence: in the city there are many Jews who live permanently or for a very long time due to their trade and other affairs and are not included in the city population. Jewish houses, not being the property of one person, and sometimes constituting the property of several families, cannot serve as data by which, even desirably, with a small error, it would be possible to determine the number of their inhabitants. When concluding marriages among themselves, many, even the majority of Jewish families, accepting a son-in-law for a year, two, three or even five years, depending on the marriage conditions and the son-in-law's property status, subsequently move to other localities."

 

The good lieutenant seems genuinely mystified by the communal customs of the Jewish population. Zuts admires one aspect of Jewish life: "the charity of the Jewish residents is expressed primarily in the fact that poor Jews receive help from the wealthier ones. Independently of this, there is a Jewish Hospital in the city, located in a house built with public funds and maintained with money donated by two wealthy Jews, Israel Epstein and Abraham Krasnoselsky."

 

And Zuts adds this very interesting detail of Jewish life. "All Jewish houses are built almost according to the same plan and the same model, having the character of a guest house, i.e. on both sides of the corridor there is a row of rooms; each room has a door into the common corridor and is also connected to the neighboring rooms by doors, mostly double-leaf. Consequently, each room has 3 doors and only the corner rooms have 2 doors." Zuts describes what is familiar to me as a "shotgun house" -- a style not at all rare in the new world but apparently exotic to the lieutenant.

The website also contains a few pictures of houses typical of Jewish inhabitants. As far as I can tell, these are recent photographs of older homes in various states of repair.

The website does not make it clear who, if anyone, is living in these houses today.

In addition, Evgeniy Schneider appends a brief history of the Jewish community of Starokonstantinov. I've transcribed it.

"Jews have lived in Starokostiantyniv since the end of the 16th century. In 1629, there were 130 Jewish families (about 25% of the total population), and the community was the second largest in Volyn. During the Khmelnytsky period, the Jews of the city and the surrounding area took refuge in the fortress. On the Ninth of Av, the Cossacks broke in and killed everyone. Starokostiantyniv was also destroyed several times by the Haidamaks in the early 18th century. But Jews continued to settle there, and in 1765, 1,801 Jews were registered in the city and its surrounding area. In 1802, the number of Jews was 2,053. In 1827, when Tsar Nicholas I issued an order to mobilize Jews into the Russian army, serious unrest broke out in Starokostiantyniv. In 1847, there were 6,611 Jews in the community, and in 1897, 9,212 (60.7% of the total population). Most of the local Jews were Hasidim, followers of the tzaddikim of the Chernobyl and Sadagora dynasties. In 1911, the city's population was about 20,000, including 11,800 Jews. With the establishment of Soviet power in Volyn in 1920, the Jewish community was disbanded. By 1926, there were 6,934 Jews in the city (41.3% of the population). There was a secondary school with instruction in Yiddish.
At the end of 1931, there were 4,837 Jews in the city (about 33% of the population), of whom more than a quarter were deprived of the right to vote ("disenfranchised").  The Germans occupied Starokostiantyniv on July 8, 1941. In late August 1941, the Jews were confined to a ghetto. The Jewish population of Starokostiantyniv and its environs was exterminated in a series of actions from August 1941 to November 1942.  Today, the town has a small Jewish community, "Shalom." In 2012, it had 80 members."  A tragic story.

 

The website posts another picture that intrigues me. It's an old photograph, probably from the the turn of the last century, of Jewish workers in what is called a "cigarette factory." I know that when Isaiah came to America, in 1895, he made his living rolling cigars. I just wonder if he followed a trade that he had begun in Starokonstantinov. Would he, perhaps, have recognized any of these contemporary, doomed Jewish workers?

 

My Aunt Mollie

This post is written for my children, grandchildren, and any potential future descendants. Aunt Mollie was an important person to my in earlier years. She should be remembered.

Mollie was my father's older sister. She was born in 1900, the third of the four children of Isaiah and Eta. She was an extremely private person and never revealed the least personal information about herself. I know nothing of her childhood and I am not even certain that she attended high school. I know that she was for many years employed in the surgical instrument field, where she advanced to a responsible management position and earned a reasonable salary (for those days). She retired early, perhaps in her fifties. She never married nor introduced me or anyone else in our family to a boyfriend, lover, or suitor, though in later life I learned that it had been her constant habit to visit a "Mr Isgin" every Wednesday. Who was Henry Isgin? I believe that he was a fellow worker at her place of employment and I know that when he died he willed Mollie his Long Island City house. That's all I know; I hope that her relationship with him was satisfying.

Mollie's curly black hair never grayed. Her eyes were so dark that there was no visible distinction between iris and pupil. My daughter, who knew her only in her last years, remembers her as small, squarish, and big-bosomed.

Mollie never "moved out"; during my childhood, she lived with her parents and later with Eta only in a small ground-floor apartment at 334 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights. When Eta died in 1963, she moved across the river to a her own place at last, a modest apartment in Greenwich Village, where she lived until her death in 1985. She enjoyed the concerts and the theater and her independence. She was a solid New Yorker; like my father, she never learned to drive an automobile. Unlike my father, who was uncomfortable outside his familiar sphere and was averse to travel, Aunt Mollie was an adventurous sort. She traveled the world, usually solo. She was constantly on the move. I heard tell, for example, that she was a passenger on one of the first commercial flights to China (in the 1930s).

In 1952, she offered to take me on a trip to Washington DC. I jumped at the chance. It was my first time out of Brooklyn and quite the revelation: gosh, there were other cities, other neighborhoods in the universe! We stayed at the Mayflower Hotel (gosh, there were hotels!), ate in "restaurants" -- another novelty -- visited the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, and even took a boat ride up the river to Mt. Vernon. We heard Harry Truman deliver a Fourth of July address from the base of the Washington Monument. It was exhilarating and inspiring -- a first toe-in-the-water alternative to my very marked provinciality and to the exaggerated caution of my parents. I am sure that I would never "gone away" to college, or relocated to the Rocky Mountain west, or traveled to other continents if it hadn't been that Aunt Mollie introduced me to the world outside the P S 217 schoolyard in my thirteenth year.

Mollie also helped me financially. She wasn't rich but as a single woman with a good income she accumulated enough cash to intervene, generously, at critical moments. In a sense, she was the family banker. She gave me a couple of thousand dollars for part of the down payment on the Hackett Hill property and later held, on favorable terms, the mortgage on my house on 10th Street. When she died, she bequeathed me the remainder of the principal.  Although these were not great sums, they were nevertheless very crucial to me and to my family's financial well-being.

Even more important: Mollie admired and, I believe, loved my wife -- which was a very good thing because my own mother was not so positive.

I can't say that I ever had a real conversation with Mollie. She asked little and told less. She was not curious, or thoughtful, nor well-educated -- not even a reader. She was always a little crude and could be critical and blunt (though not to me). To my brother, when he was going through a tough period in his financial life, she said, "Why don't you just get a real job." To a niece, she offered, "Why don't you just lose weight."  A true Victorian at heart, she regarded all illnesses as mental and moral weakness.

Mollie was proud of her extraordinary vigor and health. She once told me that she went 40 years without seeing a doctor. She was robust and middle-aged at 84, dead at 85 -- every one of her organs having failed. Loss of mental acuity was the first sign of decay. In 1984, she called my father on the telephone and said, out of the blue, "Pop is here."  Dad said, "What do you mean Pop is here. Pop died in 1946." Mollie answered, "Yes, I know that. So why is he here."  After that shocking moment, the end came quickly.

I' have never visited my parents' graves, but I'm told that Mollie is buried on my father's right and that my mother is buried on my father's left. So Dad lies forever between the two women to whom he was closest in life. 

Words of My Life: Bottom

"Bottom" is another of the many words that came into my life through the medium of baseball. As soon as I was able to walk and talk, I learned that an inning has both a "top" and a "bottom." "Bottom of the ninth" was an optimistic phrase because there was always the Ebbets Field hope that the Dodgers might come through with a game-winning rally. Later, when I discovered that there was more to human existence than baseball, the various and colorful meanings of "bottom" began to reveal themselves. For example, the posterior part of the human body, which I knew as the ass or the behind or the tuchas, was, I learned, called the "bottom" by people of sophistication. A euphemism?  A Britishism? 

Even later on, I discovered that bottom, signifying buttocks or butt was not the root meaning of the word but a metaphorical extension of its original sense. Old English botm, cognate with Latin fundus, meant land or farm or soil. This meaning of "bottom" is well-preserved in the phrase "bottom land" -- the level and fertile acres along the banks of a watercourse. Many English family names are consequently topographical surnames of ancient inhabitants of various river fronts -- such as Bottoms, Robottom, Higginbottom, Ramsbottom, Longbottom, Winterbottom, and Bottomley. Names that have nothing to do with either innings or asses.

The oddity that "bottom" can refer both to farmland and to the human butt can sometimes yield unconscious comedy. For example, in 1977, I was a guest at a wedding in the infelicitously named Kent village of Pett Bottom. I must hope that Pett is a variant of Pitt, a "hollow," rather than commonplace "pet" with a supernumerary "t".

These days, "bottom" is more likely to mean something like "the essence" -- as in such phrases "to get to the bottom of the matter"; or "the bottom of one's heart."

And then there's egregious Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, who does not disdain the mandatory pun: "This is to make an ass of me."

Shakespeare likes the word "bottom." Here's Malcolm's most memorable characterization of Macbeth.  

 

                          I grant him bloody,
Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,
Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin
That has a name: but there's no bottom, none,
In my voluptuousness: your wives, your daughters,
Your matrons and your maids, could not fill up
The cistern of my lust, and my desire
All continent impediments would o'erbear
That did oppose my will:

 

This "bottom" is not farmland or butt; it's the low point in a downward trajectory. This "bottom" is associated with "cistern" -- a receptacle for holding water.  Curiously, Shakespeare regularly uses the word in its relation to the water of oceans, most specifically the sea-bottom:  

 

            the slimy bottom of the deep.    (Richard III)

 

O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love! But it cannot be sounded; my affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal.  (As You Like It)

 

By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap,
To pluck bright honor from the pale-faced moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,
And pluck up drowned honor by the locks.  (I Henry IV)

 

As is the ooze and bottom of the sea. (Henry V)

 

Who ever yet could sound thy bottom? find
The ooze, to show what coast thy sluggish crare
Might easiliest harbour in?                                   (Cymbeline)

 

 

I suspect that Shakespeare would have savored the modern phrase, "bottom feeder."  But I doubt he would have understood, any more than I do, the names of the fifth and sixth quarks, which are top and bottom (exactly like an inning).

 

Other words of my life:  slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage. spatchcock, umpire, stopper.

My Onion Heart

Last night I woke from a dream with this peculiar phrase repeating itself in my half-conscious brain: "it fills my onion heart with fear and trembling."  

I have a couple of questions to ask of my capricious dreamatorium, which although obviously capable of creating passable iambic pentameter is rarely self-explanatory.  

a) What is "it?"  What is the nameless dread that precipitated this piece of blank verse, and b) what in the living heck is an "onion heart."  And why am I accused of having one?  Is an "onion heart" pungent and tasty, when eaten either raw or sauteed?  Or is it constructed of layers of scales and therefore mysterious and perhaps unknowable.  

Frankly, I don't have a good theory, except to say that I don't feel that to be described as having an "onion heart" is complimentary. If my dreamatorium wanted to say something nice about my heart, it had such relevant and easily available alternatives as "lionheart" or "braveheart." Or even "sweetheart," for goodness sake.

My Career as a Dowser

When we built the summer house/cabin/hovel in 1977, we needed to dig a well, and someone, probably the plumber, hired a dowser. I didn’t approve –-I would have hired a credentialed hydraulic engineer. For me, dowsers belong in the same ol' crazy crate as astrologers, phrenologists, flat-earthers, Shakespeare-author conspiracists, along with the lunatics who report on visits to the earth by ancient astronauts. Nevertheless, a dowser arrived, an elderly gentleman. Curiously, he dowsed with an old pair of rusted pliers rather than the traditional forked willow stick. He was an enthusiast for his trade and, ignoring my skepticism, showed my how to cut a willow and exactly how to hold it. After he left, I tried it out. A most odd experience, one of the oddest in my life, then took place. As I walked about, brandishing the rod, from time to time the tip of the willow would turn suddenly down. Not in a subtle way, but forcefully and dramatically – strongly enough to redden and even slightly cut the palms of my hands.  

Even more strange -- if I handed the willow to another person and he or she walked about, nothing happened. Nothing, that is, until I held that person's wrist. Then the dowsing rod went all crazy and twisted downward out of the holder's hands. 

It was a wondrous incredible experience and is vivid in my memory now these fifty years. But it was a one time only event.

Every once in a while, over the decades, just for fun, I would cut a piece of willow and walk about, but I’ve never been able to reproduce the phenomenon. The dowsing rod doesn’t dowse, doesn’t do anything at all;  just behaves like an ordinary piece of wood. 

I don't believe in dowsing. I don't believe that you can find underground water, or even underground electric wires as some think, by walking about with a piece of willow in your hands.  On the other hand, I know that something peculiar and very real happened to me that one time. Was there water underground. I don't know, but I know that I wouldn't dig a hole on the basis of that fleeting evidence. I am a man of reason, or at least I like to think so.

Incidentally, the place that the 1977 dowser picked out for us to dig was a great success. We've enjoyed a bounteous  supply of water for all these many years. 

But now that I know more about wells than I did half a century ago, I can read the landscape well enough to recognize that the dowser picked an obvious place to dig a well -- with or without the help of his magical pliers.

My Life with Shakespeare - I

As a rule, I keep my distance from live performances of a Shakespeare play because I seldom enjoy the experience and regularly find it misleading. This has not always been the case. A few versions, notably the lucid Scofield Coriolanus at Stratford in 1962, are still vivid in my brain. What has happened?  Somewhere along the way, I've lost patience and lost interest in playgoing. Am I alone?  I remember sitting in some theater or other in the way back when, when, glancing left and right in my row, I could not help noting that a significant cadre of my fellow spectators were not engrossed in the performance but were nodding off, and that others in my vicinity were clearly bored, drifting passively toward sweet sleep.

This is a phenomenon that I had never encountered at a baseball game where everyone is alert and engaged. Anything but silent and sometimes raucous?

So why were all these numb Shakespeare spectators sitting as still as stones?

And why was I among them, inasmuch as I too, let me confess, was bored by the performance. I was not, as I yearned to be, lost in the words or engaged by the action. While I resisted sleep, except possibly for a second or two here and there, I was treading mental water, so to speak. Not exactly hypnotized, but certainly not transfixed. And I was in this state of inattention even though I knew the words that the actors were saying as well or better than they knew them themselves. Eventually, in the course of time, I came to admit to myself that to attend a Shakespeare play was not for pleasure but rather to honor an eminence, to pay dues to a cultural icon, to participate in a ritual of cultural hegemony -- and that I had paid good money in order to worship at the shrine of Shakespeare and to lend my support to what has long been labelled "Shakespeare idolatry."  This revelation, or apercu, or insight made me unhappy as I am not by nature given to reverence. To try to bend my will to admire on-stage oratory felt inauthentic, contrary to myself as I knew myself. 

Yet I am an unabashed, unapologetic lover of Shakespeare. Not of the theater, but of the book. When I sit myself down to read one of Shakespeare's most excellent plays, the experience can be and often is utterly transcendent. 

It is reading that unlocks the play; puts me in touch with true genius.There's something about the one-on-one concentration that you can give to a book in your very own hands in your very own chair that you can't give to a performance, where you're crammed into your space and have lost to your neighbor the battle for the arm rest. You're distracted by the inevitable snuffles and sneezes of your fellows and by the too-clever sets and costumes and lighting and artifice -- all of which interfere with your grasp of what is most important about poetic drama -- the words. But at home, I'm dazzled by the poetry and I am transported with aesthetic bliss (however defined). I'm moved to tears and laughter and also admiration.

He's endlessly fascinating, this Shakespeare guy, and intelligent, and a poet like none other. 

It's all I need; a comfortable posture for my ancient limbs, a bit of silence, a book --  and I'm in awe. 

Performances, in my opinion, erect a barrier to understanding and obscure rather than illuminate the plays. It's necessarily so, because directors and actors interpret the play.  It's their job;  it's what they do. Interpret. And every interpretation, no matter how skillful, is an obstacle.

A reader is less constrained and can keep his mind open. No one, no thing, to mediate between the eyes and the page.  

Performances are especially hazardous when directors deliberately attempt to make a play relevant or in accord, somehow, with the zeitgeist of the decade. Clever catchpenny novelties do nothing for me. Why must plays be set anywhere but where Shakespeare intended them?  Any effort to update a play, or make it "contemporary" or "feminist" or "anti-fascist" or "anti-colonial" or whatever, produces only distraction and distortion. Which is why the long history of Shakespeare on stage is a woeful history of addled misinterpretation. Nahum Tate's notorious King Lear of 1681, in which Edgar and Cordelia embrace at the end and Lear is pensioned off is ludicrous, but not more absurd than last year's Queen Lear.

Query: if I'm so disdainful of live performances, how is it that I'm so fond of Shakespeare on film.

But that's a subject for another day. 

My Life in Cooking

And now for another installment in my long-running "autobiography by topics." 

Today's topic is my life as a cook. I say cook, rather than chef, because my kitchen work has always been functional rather that artistic -- the very opposite of sophisticated or elegant. I am most definitely not a chef -- just a guy who can put a meal on the table. Confession: I prefer to my own food to what is presented to me at all but the most elite restaurants. I'm basically a hamburger-and-ketchup plebeian; fancy foods with exotic ingredients do nothing for my pedestrian palate. Why leeks, chives, ramps or shallots when your everyday yellow onion will do the job. Especially if it's one of those amazingly sweet Vidalia onions.

My lack of gourmet-ism originated with my family of origin, back there in 1940s Flatbush where cooking was not imaginative. Its basics were Velveeta cheese and those slimy canned Harvard beets. No frills but a sufficiency where "enough [was] as good as a feast." My mother, who presided over the kitchen, did it all, every bit of it (my father might just have starved if he had to extend himself to boil water). Mom was a functional cook and her limited repertoire of meals repeated weekly. I never knew her to try something new nor did I once see her consult a cookbook. Spices were limited to salt and pepper. Chicken was boiled, lamb chops were broiled, flounder was poached. There was too much malodorous liver and too much tongue and too many salmon croquettes. Almost all meals were accompanied with mashed potatoes. My favorite food, in those days, was noodles with a meat-and-tomato sauce (which would nowadays have been upgraded to "Bolognese"). (The word "noodles" was later promoted to "spaghetti" and has now been ennobled to "pasta.") On an occasional flush Sunday there was roast beef. The family celebrated Thanksgiving with a grand turkey and countered Yom Kippur with a defiant roast pork.

What a tedious chore it was for my mom to set out twenty-one meals a week for the five of us, but she did so without complaint.

The only memorable meals of my childhood were supplied by my grandmother Sonia. Unsurpassed blintzes, potato latkes, jams and jellies. My favorite meal in those days: black radish, onion and pumpernickel complemented with gribbinis. I have written about my love affair with the black radish here.

The first steps into cookery of my own arose out of my native frugality. When I was in college, most of my friends ate in the dorm cafeteria or in nearby restaurants but I soon discovered that with a little initiative I I could eat better and cheaper. It was a bit of a learning process, because, growing up, I regarded cooking as a kind of alchemy to which only married women were privy. In 1957, I abandoned the dormitory for a remarkably grotty off-campus apartment and discovered that I too could turn on a gas burner and transmogrify raw ingredients into food. For the next three years I lived on a hunk of meat and a boiled potato and warmed frozen peas -- at a quarter the cost of an equivalent restaurant meal! Not elegant food -- but what a revelation!  It was not only an improvement in standard of living, but a demonstration to myself that I need not imitate my father's example of dependent helplessness. 

My galley skills, such as they were, were also good for my social life. Dates with my girlfriend (later my wife of more than half a century) often began with me preparing a Saturday night dinner for her. Fortunately for the two of us, she was not put off by my want of culinary imagination.

Let me record a sad reminiscence about the way in which we were all hog-tied by Eisenhower-era conservatism: I did all the cooking until June of 1960, when AGP and I married. At that point, it seemed mandatory and inevitable  that kitchen responsibilities should be transferred from me to her. It was, we believed, an inviolable rule of the universe that wives cooked and husbands ate. That was the way things were in that reactionary pre-feminist period -- even though my bride had until that point never prepared a single meal in her entire life. How conventional, how thoughtless we both were. However, true to the stereotype, AGP rapidly became a much better cook than I could have imagined. But what socially-constrained idiocy! How blinkered were the two of us! It's embarrassing to confess it all even sixty-plus years after the fact. 

Once the three children joined us, cooking became less fun and more of an obligation -- but now a chore at last shared by the two of us. Inasmuch as we were both employed, food preparation became a weekend activity. Together we'd cook up a cauldron of beef stew or a spaghetti sauce or something else that could get us through the week. Lunches were improvised, but I was always the breakfast cook. I wish I could properly estimate the number of eggs that I scrambled or pancakes that I flipped. They would stuff a moderately-sized warehouse, I'm sure. For AGP, meals became a burden. If I remember correctly, it was not so much the labor of preparation as it was the organization that distressed her. Just gathering the ingredients and keeping the refrigerator stocked became dull boring work. Her point, and I know she was correct in this, was that even if I did I half the cooking, she had 100% of the responsibility. Things became even more complicated when the kids went through their vegetarian phases and when their complicated after school activities made orderly scheduling next to impossible. 

I remember that one summer, sometime in the 70s. I announced that I would do all the gathering and cooking for two months. AGP's only task was to lie in the hammock all day and to eat whatever I produced. AGP enjoyed the vacation, but she pointed out that it our society, men could get the credit for labor that was taken for granted for women. She was once again correct in her assessment, but nevertheless I felt that I had done a good deed. I think she enjoyed the kitchen respite. 

Eventually the kids left home and life became simpler. We were now "recovering parents."  Food preparation became simpler and fun again. Joint fun.

Unfortunately, it was only a few years later that AGP began her long decline. Of course I took over more and more of the kitchen responsibilities. I think for the last ten years that AGP was with me, I was the head and only cook. How else would we have survived?  As a result, I became more interested in the work. As I have said, I never became a chef, but I do take some pride in my general competence around the kitchen -- especially in my barbecued spare ribs, my beef stew, my stuffed cabbage (grandma Sonia's recipe) and my transcendent lasagnas. 

Nowadays, in my miraculous second relationship, cooking, like everything else, is shared equally. 

Gosh it's been a long haul.

A New Orleans Conversation

For our annual winter stay in New Orleans, we rented a place in the old Bywater district. It's a feature of the neighborhood that one house is a perfect example of classic vernacular architecture while the next one over is a ramshackle mess, smelling of mold and nearly swallowed by yellow cat's paw creeper. And then one over after that is a vacant lot, the home having been demolished years ago.

Almost all Bywater houses touch or impinge on the sidewalk, European-style, and many of their owners decorate the public way with pots of common annuals, especially those lovely rocket pink snapdragons. Others set out repurposed bathtubs and various other containers filled with flowering perennial plants that I can't identify. It's a mighty colorful area -- when it isn't derelict. 

Somewhere on Royal Street (or was it Decatur?) between Desire and Independence, we admired the sidewalk garden of a renewed double-shotgun (a common kind of home) and fell into neighborly chat with the bright-eyed old lady sitting on its porch (or stoop, or veranda, or patio). We offered, "good day for taking some sun," and she, perhaps lonely, launched into a monologue: "my friend takes care of me. He's young. I broke my hip last year, so no more stairs." Etc. And then she asked, quite out of the blue, "how old do you think I am?" Clearly, she was proud to boast of her many years.

Now, I've been around enough blocks to know that it's never a good idea to estimate someone's age. It's a difficult art -- you must guess about ten percent below what you think is accurate, because if you guess older you've insulted the inquirer and if too much younger you're guilty of insincere flattery. So I hesitated, kept quiet. At last, to break the silence, I replied "well, ma'am, how old are you?" I thought I had given a safe response because I could see that she wanted me to be curious. "I'm 84, can you believe it?" 

I was more surprised than she had imagined, because if I had ventured a guess, I would have said 92. Or at the lowest, way up in the 80s, because, well, the woman looked ancient and frail. She reminded me my two grandmothers, who died at 87 and 89 and who, in their last years, rarely if ever left their homes but if they did venture out, did nothing more adventurous than to sit on a bench for a few warm minutes. 

But I'm 85, a year older than my new Bywater acquaintance. She's inactive, winding down her life, resting in a soft chair, and I'm not only upright and walking, but happily exploring a distant city. For a moment I felt a bit of superiority, of triumph. I certainly did not say to my elderly friend, "yeah, you're 84 but I'm 85, look at me." I'm not that crude. But I confess that those or similar words passed through my brain. Not a sentiment that I admire in myself and one I quickly banished. It was unhandsome, ungenerous even if it came and went in a millisecond.

I know that I'm fortunate to be moderately vigorous, still strolling the avenues and enjoying good health. Yet I am very aware that my well being is not an achievement about which I can be vain or proud. It's simply the luck of the draw, luck of the genes. In addition, it's a fact that I have been fortunate enough to have had access to a lifetime of superior medical care. Without that surgery in 2010, and the later one a decade ago, I would not have been touring the Bywater. I'd have been dead or at best, wheelchair-bound and in pain, gorging on advils and aspirins and narcotics. A moment's reflection served as a good antidote to any feeling of superiority that I might harbor. 

Still musing, I began to wonder about my Royal Street friend. Who is she, aside from an ancient person savoring the sun?  What memories does she hold? Who knows, perhaps she lived a wild and varied life. Was she a traveller, an adventurer?  Enjoying complicated and deep relationships with a series of devotees?  Perhaps she was a talented musician -- a soloist in the church choir -- or an artist?  I allowed myself to fantasize what she was like in her glamorous thirties -- crossing the equator on a cruise with her first husband, the one with the estate in Jamaica. And the children: one a famous surgeon, the other, the unlucky one who was a hero in Iraq but who took years to regain his footing. Or was she, perhaps, a writer?

Everybody has a story; what is hers?  

My Life in Gambling

This will be a very short entry, because gambling is not a part of my life. I'm not averse, just uninterested. My brain lacks a gambling gene.

I don't bet on sports; I don't participate in office pools; I've never once been to the track. I don't bet on cards because I don't play cards, not even solitaire. I've never put so much as a nickel into a slot machine. I've never bought a single lottery ticket. 

My idea of gambling is to put a dollar into a Coke machine -- sometimes you get the Coke, sometimes the machine fails. That's chance enough for me. 

Two Astonishing Dreams in One Single Night

The first:  I dreamt that I received a phone call from my deceased older brother's deceased first wife (who has, by the way, been dead for thirty or more years). She says, very clearly, "______ is dead" (I leave out the name of the person she mentioned because some people are squeamish or superstitious -- but a person very much alive. I'm shocked. I say, "what happened."  There's no answer at the other end although I hear the sounds of paper rustling. I ask again and once more there is  no response. Then I say, "did he do himself in." There is quiet at the other end of the line. End of dream. I take the non-answer as agreement -- yes, it was suicide  After a while, I wake up, less troubled than puzzled. How peculiar -- how different from my usual "lost-in-the big-city" or "can't-find-the-classroom" fantasy.

Later in the night, I dream that it's time for me to write a novel (remarkable in itself because I am a most unimaginative, uncreative person and not a writer of fiction). In the dream, I compose the first paragraph of a novel. I can't remember my exact words, but basically I set the scene in an old, tired, tumble-down country tavern where a couple of nondescript folks are sitting and drinking. It's all very fuscous, grey, washed out. (In retrospect, it seems as though I've plagiarized Thomas Hardy.)  But I complete the paragraph with this remarkable sentence: "A brindle cat supplied the color." A wonderful detail, even if I do say so myself. But here's an oddity. Even though my well-informed dreamatorium found and deployed the word "brindle," my conscious self is not familiar with the word. What a revelation!!

I wake out of the dream and, immensely curious, immediately google the word "brindle" which turns out to mean something like tortoiseshell -- a standard very familiar domestic cat color. My daytime self is therefore dazzled by the pertinent vocabulary of my nighttime self.

I am also impressed by the use of the word "supply" -- a brindle cat supplied the color" --where my more pedestrian daytime self might have said, "there was a brindle cat." 

Once again, I find that although I'm a moderately dull kind of guy during the day, my unconscious or dream life is imaginative and daring. How can this happen?

Moreover, I wonder what would my life have been like if I had been granted easy access to the creative side of my brain? Is it possible that I would have written many a sentence as accomplished as "a brindle cat supplied the color." 

[Addendum April 24 

Just a few minutes ago I woke out of the usual troubled sleep.  I must have been dreaming, but I can't recall a single detail except that the name "Karlheinz Stockhausen" came vividly to me. I even said the name out loud (there's a witness). But why in the living blazes would Karlheinz Stockhausen be in my mind, or unconscious mind, or dream life?  I am aware that KS was a composer of electronic music; that is to say, I've heard his name. But I'm not interested in electronic music and as far as I know I've never heard a single note of any of his compositions. He's not a figure to whom I've given a moment of conscious thought. And yet there he was in my mind and in my mouth. Without the slightest inkling of context. 

Minds (especially my very own) are mighty mysterious.] 

State of the Person

If there can be a "state of the union" address, and in Colorado a "state of the state," why should we not have a "state of the person" -- specifically, the state of this person, i.e. me. An annual report. Today seems like a good day for it -- inasmuch as I have just now passed a weighty milestone, my 85th birthday. 

On the whole, let me say, without bragging, that this particular person is in a surprisingly good state.

My Brain: it's still working. I believe that I am as competent as ever at analyzing problems and drawing conclusions and planning appropriate actions. Nor have I lost a significant amount of language. There is even an occasional moment in which I wow myself with a well chosen word or a smidgeon of wit. That's the good news. The downside is that my recall system has definitely lost ground. Noun loss, it's called. My memory for names has woefully declined, so much so that it's become a considerable annoyance. I can recognize an acquaintance on the street, or, say, actors in a film, or an athlete, but I cannot bring up a name. I test myself when I watch NBA basketball on the TV.  A familiar player appears on my screen: I know where he went to college and who he played for last season and the strengths and weaknesses of his game, but by golly I can't recall his name. I find this to be highly frustrating -- and perhaps a scary harbinger of future debility. Sometimes the moniker bobs to the surface a day later, making me aware that my storage system is still working. No question but that my celebrated, prize-winning instant recall is a thing of the past. Also starting to fail: short-term memory. Nowadays, when I read a long novel, by the time I come to the conclusion I've forgotten details from the first chapters. A couple of times now, when I've read a good new novel or a classic old one, I've turned right around and gone through a second time. Trust me, this was not a habit of my younger brain. I also find it difficult to acquire and retain new knowledge. I spent four years studying Italian and made no more than a year's progress. I had to complete the same lessons over and over again just to make it stick -- only to have the expression or the conjugation or whatever evaporate in a month. I can't memorize poetry -- which I once did so effortlessly. So I've mostly given up new areas of information -- although this last month I'm taking a crack at learning Etruscan -- a challenge even though it's an extinct language with only about 250 known words. No struggles with pronunciation, thank goodness! 

My mood: generally positive and cheerful, except between 2 am and 4 am, when I lie awake filled with real and imaginary dread. I experience sadness, of course, but not depression. No need for anti-depressants or anti-psychotics, thank goodness.v I'm optimistic, on the whole, still taking pleasure in small things,

My Body: still functioning although some routine tasks have become difficult. Putting on socks and shoes, for example. I'm just not limber -- not even as limber as I was at 75. When things fall to the floor in the morning I tend to let them lie until later in the day when I'm slightly more supple. When I work in the garden, I keep a long stick next to me so I have something to help me arise. Sometimes I feel myself starting to shuffle, the way my father did in his last years -- and then I make a determined effort to lift my feet. I have almost all of my own teeth (a couple of fakes) and with the help of specs and hearing aids my eyes and ears are valiantly continuing to do the job.   

Your older body has accumulated some deficits: a touch of cancer, four kinds of heart peculiarities, the threat of another TIA or UTI. But I do as I'm told and take the pills that my various doctors recommend. I asked the fine serious woman who serves as my cardiologist, "what is going to kill me?" She replied that at my age, and given my state of health, the most likely causes were a) a fall, and b) an infection. Consequently I've become mighty careful about where I set my feet. I don't know what to do about infections except to be vigilant. But it would be foolish not to recognize that at this age life is precarious and that anything can happen at any time. I could keel over before I finish the next sentence. One undeniable symptom of deterioration is that my stamina is much diminished. Much more resting between tasks, many more naps.

The hardest part of the day continues to be the nighttime. I've aways been a bad sleeper and I'm no better now. Lying awake can lead to alarmism: is that pain in my knee a bruise or is it a blood clot that will go to my heart, or is it a symptom of a metastatic cancer?  But alarmism is not as troubling now as it was in days of yore -- no matter what happens now, they can't take the first 85 years from me. Frankly, I'm more worried about living too long than I am about dying.

I'm always been troubled with nightmares and continue to be so. I envy those who turn out the light at 11 and wake up at 7. It would be blissful to be one of those elect. On most nights, instead of sleeping I roll and twirl like a rotisserie chicken. It's wonderful that the Widder Malkinson is able to ignore my tossing and turning.

Family: I'm most pleased about my family and family relations. Although I was not a perfect father, I was a hard-working and serious one, and I think that my children would acknowledge such. I love all three of my children more than they can know -- or at least, more than they could know until they had children of their own. I like all my kids and grandkids and on the whole they like me. I believe that I grew closer to my kids during the years of A's long decline. I have good conversations, or at least polite ones, with the older grandchildren but the three younger ones treat me with no more interest or respect than if I were an orange cone -- which is probably appropriate for their age; I certainly did not engage with my grandparents or people of their generation when I was 9 or 11. I hope to live until the the young guys are in their twenties when they might find it consequential to talk with their aged GP. 

I've made an effort to keep in touch with cousins -- especially cousins on my father's side. After all, I am by far the oldest member of my extended family -- the "patriarch," I like to say. 

Love: here's a great success story. My relationship with the Widder has been near-miraculous -- a ten-year honeymoon, although it may seem soppy to says so. Of course in some ways it's easier to form a relationship at this age of little responsibility -- no conflict over children, no careers, no declining parents, no money worries, very few obligations. Both Lynn and I appreciate this much simpler life. Her and my offspring have been generous with us -- a boon that we do not take for granted. Moreover, it's common knowledge that people in a loving situation live longer than singletons -- so we're both, in theory, keeping each other alive.

Friends: very important to me at this stage of life. I work at keeping in touch. But every month, it seems, some 50-year friendship comes to an end. The death and diseases of my friends and family and former colleagues are the most painful feature of this octogenarian life.

Intellectual life: I read a lot and write a bit, but I no longer read books about books. I like writing this blog. At this point in my life, I read at least 9 non-fiction books for every novel. In addition, I've become fascinated by the films of the 40s and 50s and watch as many as two or three a week. There's something reassuring about the black-and-white cinematography, the ubiquitous fedoras, the coast-to-coast trains, and even the ever-present curl of cigarette smoke. 

The world: quite a mess. A period of great reaction. There's a real danger of losing our democracy. And losing our planet. But I'm cheered that there are so many people of good will in the world and in my life.

When I was a young fellow peering at the calendar, I thought "the year 2000 is a long way off. If I should live to the new millennium, I'll be 61 years old and I'll have lived a long life."  Now I'm a quarter century beyond that marker, still going strong. Who ever would have guessed?  My principal emotion at this point: gratitude. Gosh I've been fortunate.

Ball Games I Played During the 1940s and 1950s.

Basketball, volleyball, punchball, stickball, dodgeball, box ball, box baseball, baseball, softball, stoop ball, touch football, handball, kickball, wall ball. Ping-pong. Hit the penny. Never played tennis or tackle football. Never even heard of soccer.

What have I forgotten?

Words of My Life -- "Joint"

"Joint" is a word that in the course of my lifetime has engaged in some serious shape-shifting. When I first encountered the word, joint (derived from the Latin jungere, to join) was simply a place where two pieces of wood were glued together or where one's bones were articulated to produce a wrist, elbow, or knee. Mighty simple and uncomplicated, it would appear -- but even then "joint" had begun to accumulate variants. Rick Blaine's sentence in Casablanca was an early warning: "of all the gin joints in all the towns in the world, she has to come into mine." A "joint" was apparently a nightclub or bar. "Gin joint" suggests that  "Rick's Cafe Americain" was louche or sleazy, and perhaps it was, what with all the crooked gambling going on and with the mysterious "letters of transit" stuffed into Sam's piano. But why "joint"?  It seems fanciful to suppose that a joint was a place where various people "joined" together, but I can't think of a more persuasive etymology.    

Another use of joint came to my attention in the late 1960's when I became seriously interested in Jacobean oak furniture. Here's a handsome "joint stool":   

A joint stool was the most ordinary kind of chair during the period when Shakespeare was wielding his quill. Why "joint"?  Apparently because it was a joined stool, and therefore of higher quality than one that was merely glued. A joiner was a skilled craftsman before mass-produced nails and screws became inexpensive and commonplace.

Shakespeare knew joint stools very well: "Cry you mercy, I took you for a joint-stool," says the Fool to a joint stool. Fool humors mad hallucinating Lear by pretending that the joint stool is the king's daughter Goneril. Shakespeare, by the by, played many a variation on "joint," employing or inventing  such terms as "joint-servant," "joint-laborer," "joint-ring," "jointress," "unjointed," "injointed," "short-jointed," "conjointly," and "disjoint."

But even Shakespeare would not have imagined the transfigurations of the word in these our latter days. Nowadays, a joint is a prison, though I don't know why one would call it so when such colorful appellations as "hoosegow," "clink," "stir," "slammer," and "pokey" are all on the tips of our collective tongues. Nor would he have imagined "joint" as a marijuana blunt or spliff. He wouldn't have known but might have appreciated "joint" as a term for the male sexual organ.

All of which makes it possible, theoretically, to say, "I was in a joint, smoking a joint, figuring out how to exercise my joint."

As for me, I use the word "joint" everyday -- in the most useful phrase "joint card."

Other words of my life:  slouch, cishet, yips, ramps, jot and tittle, worship, mucilage. spatchcock, umpire, stopper.

Comments

[Loretta J. Krause]

Being only as computer savvy as was necessary for me to write "Barefoot to Palestine," I was fascinated by the beauty of this blog.
As I wrote the novel, Emelia's line leaped out at me - I not only saw the passion and determination such powerful love could evoke - an impossible journey, to Palestine, barefoot, for a touch of her lover's nether lip, but the line corroborated the existence of Palestine via Shakespeare, and took the love Rachel had for Samir, her husband, dead at her own father's hand, beyond limits, beyond eternity.
I could not have given my novel a loretta J. better title than this.
Sincerely,
LJK

[Elizabeth DuVall]

Every time I come back to this post I start off intending to leave a comment... and every time, I find myself so deeply in-trance, due to the gorgeous truth in the insights of your blog post, I crawl away from this URL without managing to tap out "thank you!!!!!" Rectifying that now. :-)
From my very earliest beginnings as a young actor, this line we adore in common has electrified me. 30 years later, it resonates exponentially more deeply. But I couldn't have articulated *why* so eloquently... thank you for this post.
Elizabeth DuVall

[Fran Gardner]

Boy, are you right about The Little Drummer Boy. Most cring-worthy. Good thing MS keeps me away from shopping in person this time of year.
Although I just came across little piece of writing from years ago (in more ambulatory times) where I noted I was charmed to hear the hymn "In the Bleak Midwinter" (words by Christina Rossetti) in Walgreens. Some Christmas songs are very nice.

[Dan Fallon]

Dr. Metablog will remember the well-known Colorado artist, John Fudge, who also was thrown into whirling depression by the annual reappearance of contemporary U.S. Christmas. Fudge was famous for his large life-like paintings that some said resembled cartoons. Indeed, he provided captions for most of them. My favorite was a painting of a WWII German Messerschmitt fighter plane bearing down through clouds, with its Iron Cross and Swastika clearly visible, and the cannons under its wings blazing away with deadly fire. The pilot is clearly visible in the cockpit, wearing a white-fur lined red cap and sartorially bedecked with a large fluffy white beard, his red cheeks glowing, his eyes sparkling, as he bears down on his flight stick, his fingers squeezed tight on the cannon triggers. The caption of this painting is "You better watch out!"

[Chris Kyrle]

"It exposes and corrects the 'greatest generation' myth." You left me hanging here. How does it expose it? In what way was it not a great generation? The sacrifices it made were certainly great. Please expand on this.

[Fran Gardner]

I really enjoyed reading this essay.
I hope at some point you can expand on the greatest generation myth.

[Don Z. Block]

Homogenized Middleton? Would it not be educational to read his satiric tragedies and discover that he was not dramatizing colonization or anticipating Freud? Or that Shakespeare in "Taming of the Shrew" was not being a subtle feminist?

[Tom Cartelli]

I love this, esp b/c I never knew we share another lifelong interest. My father took me to Knicks games at the old Garden dating back to 1958-59 or so, also to Rangers games and every big Track & Field event. I fondly remember Jumping Johnny Green, Willie Naulls, Richie Guerin & company, and follow the current-day Knicks closely. I esp. enjoyed their recent whipping of your world-champ Nuggets. More on all this anon.

[Don Z. Block]

Yeah, I know. Couldn't resist.

[Vivian]

I suspect that "suppressing an organism" is a misprint for "suppressing an orgasm."

[Don Z. Block]

I assume that before Carol Park began sneezing into her elbow (in public), she would let it rip in pews and other public places. I like the idea of people in pews being covered by a good one. It teaches them the futility of saying "Bless you," something I refuse to allow my students to say when someone sneezes.

As for suppressing an organism, the only kind I would suppress these days is the one occupying the Oval Office.

[Carol Park]

I can't imagine why anyone would want to suppress a sneeze (to prove what? and to whom?). Perhaps while sitting on a plane or in a movie theater while watching "Contagion" -- especially if sitting on a plane WHILE watching "Contagion" -- would suppression be a good and polite option.

I would argue FOR the art of sneezing. I myself am a Big Sneezer. I've cultivated this skill over a lifetime of sneezing. Some might find it sophomoronic and degrading but I like giving into the urge. Would you suppress an organism?

I know I'm in the minority. Once in church I sneezed so loud, my daughter and boyfriend immediately scooted down the pew away from me, as if they had no idea who I was. And there was nary a "God Bless You" or "Kazoonheight" to be heard. It was like everyone around me had been hit with a stun gun.

I was mad at said daughter & boygriend for ostracizing me (and not saying "Bless you") and they were mad at me for being such an uncouth embarrassment. It was a no-win situation. I just refuse to be English.

I have learned to sneeze into my elbow (in public), which does take some of the fun out of it.

As for farting, I'm totally for suppression.

[Matt Perlstein]

Hodges must have lived at 1120 EAST 32nd St, not 1120 32nd St., which is a big difference.

[Don Z. Block]

I thought Gil lived on Bedford Avenue. I know his son, Eric, went to Midwood. I know Gil was once spotted on a snowy day buying gas in the station on the corner of Foster and Coney island Avenue. And my brother once ran into Sandy Koufax in a candy store named Lindell's on Coney Island Avenue between I and J. I have lived amongst the great ones but met them never.

[Fran Gardner]

Dear doctor,

I agree with everything. I would add that when writing an essay it’s always good to have a thesis and then some sort of tangential idea that comes out of nowhere and hits the thesis upside the head. That’s what makes a column interesting. No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.

As for making words concrete and ending the sentences with a punch, bravo, bravo. I’m reminded that I can’t read the author Neil Gaiman because I know how every sentence is going to end before it ends. That’s really depressing.

Walking down the street? How about just walking? I like to write kneel instead of kneel down and reach instead of reach up. Too many adverbs get in the way.

[Don Z. Block]

I do teach writing. May I give your words to my students?

[Timmy Jo Given]

This is worthy of sharing with every aspiring writer I know. Masterfully done. Thanks so much.

[Liz Scarboro]

If I were teaching writing, I'd ask you if I could print this out as an essential reference for my students. Since I'm not, I'll print it out and tack it to my wall.

[CKNC]

masterful. thank you.

[Laurie Katcher Lindner]

who is this

[Althea]

I couldn't agree with you more.

[Don Z. Block]

The deity apparently needs to be constantly reassured that he is the greatest, and since prayer apparently does that, the deity demands prayer, but as you have pointed out, judging from the atrocities that continue to occur, human beings have never learned how to pray. Unless we get the words right and the physical mannerisms that must accompany these words, the deity will continue to allow kids and adults to get cancer and to be massacred. And the deity does have a dark sense of humor as witness the number of mass murders that occur in houses of worship. Killings in mosques, churches, and synagogues are clearly the deity's way of teaching those who revere him and support him financially that we need to practice our praying so that we get it right. As a kid, I used to notice adults praying in so many different ways, but I was too young to realize that these differences meant that most people did not know what they were doing. Some would do subtle knee bends; others would do dramatic ones with the head swooping very low. All wore their shawls differently, some covering the shoulders, others only half the back. These inconsistencies would have to offend any deity that takes himself seriously.

So what can we learn from the failure of Prayer Science so far to contribute to knowledge, scientifically testable knowledge? We can infer that the old saw is true: Everything happens for a reason. When that everything happens to be a series of serial killings or a mass murder or a genocide or children being thrown out of a window or dying of cancer, we know what that reason is. Don't just pray, sinners. Pray properly.

[Don Z.Block]

That Eustacia Vye is one sexy woman. In the magazine version of the novel, Hardy had to change a scene where Clym carries Eustacia across a stream. The magazine editor required Clym to place Eustacia in a wheelbarrow and wheel her across the stream.

[Marilyn Kaufman]

Correction, the Facebook name is “Memories of Old Brooklyn.”

[Marilyn Kaufman]

Hi P.S. 217 Alumni, I attended classes from 1949 Kindergarten to 8th Grade. I recall many of the angry and scary teachers starting with the scariest, Mrs. Mandeburg, the sewing teacher. I only had her for home room and we had to sit with hands clasped on desk till our veins swelled. Rumors had it that she threw scissors at the girls if they messed up a sewing project. Then, one day Miss Bildersee came into our class announcing Mandeberg would not be returning and a wonderful young teacher, Mrs Hecht replaced her. Next, of course was Miss McNulty who I had for math. I was terrified of her and went home with stomach aches after her tests. Following, was Miss Graves our Gym teacher who made the girls wear camisoles under our blouses; she wasn’t mean, but very strict. My favorite teacher started with our Home Ec, Mrs. Schuller (sp?) who I thank today for her efforts in teaching us how to cook, bake, set a proper table and stack a dishwasher. I loved the warmth and friendliness she brought to the class. Another favorite was Mrs. Cares. A few girls were invited to her home for milk and cookies after school. She was an excellent teacher who we respected and didn’t fear. Mrs. Winifred, the art teacher, had an interesting, creative classroom. I ran for secretary of the G.O. In 8th grade and won election. I think my opponent was a male, and looking back, there was a nice rapport both male and female living in a multi cultural environment. I don’t recall any prejudice with religion or races. As many of you mentioned, General Assembly on Fridays was always a nice break from classes. Today, all these teachers who terrorized us are probably long gone and I like to remember Westminster Road and Coney Island Avenue, for great Chinese food, the Leader Movie theater and a wonderful Italian restaurant across the street on Coney Island Avenue (name?) If anyone wants some Brooklyn nostalgia, you can go to Facebook and join “Straight Outta’ Brooklyn.” Good catching up with all of you!

[Carol Saturansky]

Thank you, thank you, thank you all. Nostalgia-time in high gear. Myself, a graduate of P.S. 230, Montauk JHS (P.S. 223, I think) and Erasmus, class of 1965. Wore the middy blouse, was in color guard, had no idea what that was or why we sang those songs. But Michael Chriss's comment and his being saved by Principal Mary Teatum wrenched my heart, opened it and mixed blood and tears together. I learned or rather, remembered, how mighty is the salvation of a stranger's sweet intervention. I will try to corral this feeling, as it's an antidote to the merely illusionary safety recognized to in the blague of March 1 (yesterday), 2023.

[Michael Chriss]

GOING HOME AGAIN

Thomas Wolfe once wrote that you can't go home again. But he was wrong. Last month, after an absence of almost half a century, I went home again, to P.S. 217.
The first time I entered P.S. 217 was in 1941, when I began 1st grade. I stayed there until 1949, when I graduated from the 8th grade. At that time P.S. 217 went from Kindergarten to 8th grade, after which you went to high school, which for me was Midwood. Eventually, my family moved west, to Arizona, where I finished high school and then went on to the University of Arizona. I fulfilled a boyhood dream when I later became a professor of astronomy, teaching this subject for over 30 years at colleges in California, where I live now.
Now 30 years of teaching is a long time. It is an even longer time back to when I was a child at P.S. 217. But I remember those days well. And although I had never -until last month- been back to see P.S. 217 again, I have never really forgotten those days. They were the days of my childhood, the days of World War Two, and the days when I grew up. And ever since those days, hanging on the wall of whatever home I was living in over the years, has been the picture taken of my class on the front steps of P.S. 217 on that day in 1949 when I graduated. No, I haven't forgotten those days at all. However, they were dimming with the passage of time. Until last month, that is, when these scenes from my childhood took life again. Let me tell you about it.
In the years since I moved away from New York I found myself returning every so often in connection with my work, or to visit family. But as I grew older, these visits became fewer and fewer, until it began to seem that I might never return again. A letter from a colleague in the Ukraine changed all that. It came from someone I had visited a few years back when I went to the Soviet Union -when it was the Soviet Union- to deliver a series of lectures. Now she was taking a group of her students to New York for two weeks, and I decided to join them. I knew it would very likely be the last time I might see New York. It was with such a thought in my mind that the irresistible desire came over me that I must go back to Brooklyn, to the place where I grew up, and walk the streets I used to walk as a child on my way to my classes at P.S. 217. That day of return, which I shall never forget, came on my last day in New York. My friend and her students had departed for home, and an uncertain future. Now was my time, to return to my past.
It was a strange feeling that I had as I emerged from the Avenue H subway stop of the Brighton line. As I walked toward Coney Island Avenue there was a surreal quality to what I was seeing. Things seemed at the same time both familiar ... and unfamiliar. There was the candy store I hung around all those years. But it wasn't the same. There were the stores I went to on errands my mother sent me on ... but they were all different now. Signs that used to be in English and Hebrew were now in Russian and Pakistani ... and English. The Kent Theater, where for 11 cents I used to spend every Saturday afternoon looking at Errol Flynn or Betty Grable, along with the newsreels of the war and a cartoon, was now a triplex, and not quite as elegant as I remembered it. The alleys where I used to play hide-and-seek were now all locked behind cyclone fences. My old apartment house looked ... well, old. Inside the lobby, I checked the names on the directory -almost thinking I might see familiar ones... maybe even my own. Most names were missing. Those that were there were all changed now. I walked the streets looking for familiar faces. Again, all changed. And, strangest of all, was the realization that no one knew me or who I was .... here, on a block where I used to know everyone, and they knew me. Here where I grew up, I was now a stranger. Maybe Thomas Wolfe was right after all ... maybe you really couldn't go home again. But, as I was soon to find out, although he was right, he was also wrong!
I turned away from my familiar but strange street, and started toward the school I had spent those years in, P.S. 217. How often I had walked this path to school, once in the morning at 8:30, once again to come home for lunch at noon, and then, repeating this trip for the afternoon session, from 1 to 3. Crossing Foster and Coney Island Avenues, I spotted it. Oh, the cyclone fence around the yard was a bit caved in, and there also seemed to be something being built in that yard where I had stood on line innumerable times at the start of each day, and where I had clapped erasers when I was lucky enough to be chosen by my teacher for that much-sort-after job. But the school looked the same. I walked up to Newkirk Avenue to see the front entrance. Still the same. I could almost see the faces of my classmates as they stood there on that now long ago day when we had our graduation picture taken. And then, I did what would have been unthinkable when I was a child attending this school: I walked up the stairs, opened the door of the main entrance, and entered into the school lobby. (The Main Entrance was only for adults, teachers, the Principal, and other important persons back in my day; never for students!)
After all these years. From 1941 to 1949. Here I was again! My "greeting" came from the Security Officer (-we never had such a person in my time): "What do you want?", she said. "Can I look around?", I asked. "What for?", she shot back. (I was beginning to understand that nothing got past this lady where the security of the students was concerned.) I told her that I used to go to this school, hoping that might work. It didn't. "Sorry", she said, "I can't let you go walking around the halls". I must have looked crushed, and wondering what to say next. To come all this way, after all this time, and not to get past the lobby! But seeing my expression of dejection, she softened. "When were you at this school", she asked me. I brightened. "From 1941 to 1949", I quickly told her. She smiled. "Well. you're older than I am", she informed me, in what I had come to recognize as a lilting Jamaican accent. A man standing nearby, someone I thought who might be also working at the school, joined in now. "I attended here at about that time. That was when Bildersee was the Principal", he said. "Right", I answered, eager at this friendly recognition of a shared time, "and Neenan was the Vice-Principal". I was beginning to feel a little happier, a feeling which increased when a young, good-looking woman walked through the door and joined our group. After a brief explanation to her from the Security Guard, this new person turned to me and said, "Wait here a while. I have some things to do, and then I will be able to help you". Wonderful! But who was this woman? I asked her. She told me: Mary Teatum, the Principal of P.S. 217.
Mary Teatum was to spend the next hour and a half with me, taking me on a tour of the school which took us up through every floor in the building, from the bottom to the top. Now, when I was a student here, I had classes on every floor, starting on the ground floor when I entered into the 1st grade, and then going to higher levels in the building as I went to higher levels in my classes, finishing on the top floor when I reached the 7th and 8th grades. So as we climbed up each floor, I was ascending through the various years of my life: 8 years of classes in 1 1/2 hours.
We began on the first floor. I glanced over and saw the boy's bathroom, where I struggled with buttons and the leggings we wore in the winter in that fateful year of 1941. I saw the cafeteria facilities where none ever existed in my day -we all went home for meals then. Ms. Teatum poked her head into the room where I had Mrs. Recht for 1st grade. Now there was another teacher and other students, all smiling at us. Ms. Teatum told them who I was and how long ago I had been a student in this room. The teacher smiled even more brightly (-perhaps incredulously too?-) and the students greeted me in unison. This scene was to be repeated by Ms. Teatum, the teachers, and the students in every class we went into as we worked our way up through my years at P.S. 217. Did I feel good? You bet I did!
We then went to the Auditorium, where I have vivid memories of going to Assembly every Friday. The boys wore white shirts and yellow or green ties, which were the school colors. The girls wore white middy blouses with a yellow or green scarf. The Assembly began with the Color Guard procession. This Guard was made up of two lines of about 6 boys and 6 girls who marched down the center aisle, behind another student who carried the American Flag up to the stage, where they all faced us to lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance. All were very silent as Miss Bildersee, the Principal, would then solemnly walk across the stage to the podium. Miss Bildersee was a woman with a stern face and reputation to match. She had closely waved, steel-grey hair, which fitted her head like a cap. Hung around her neck, and dangling from a black ribbon, was her pince-nez spectacles. All eyes were on her as she positioned these peculiar eyeglasses on her nose and began to read something from the Bible (Psalm 123 I think was the usual selection). Then Miss. Guinan (I think most of our teachers then were Miss; large and imposing spinster-type women -very different from the young and attractive teachers I was introduced to by Ms. Teatum) would wave a huge baton at us to lead us in singing the various songs that we had been taught at previous assemblies. Or we might hear a recital of a song or piano piece by some student who might be talented enough and nervy enough to do such a thing. Each class would also present a class play for the rest of us, one play per semester per class, and always about something uplifting, like a pageant or a lesson about other cultures.
On the 3rd floor I saw the same familiar oak doors with their brass doorknobs that I remembered in my time. But, across all those years, I suddenly remembered something else, something I had quite forgotten: the windows in the doors at that time had all been taped with strong packing tape. Also the windows in the rooms. The tape made a sort of tic-tac-toe pattern on the windows. The reason for this was our fear, in 1942 and 1943, of possible German air raids on the school. The tape was to prevent the windows from shattering shards on the children. And we used to routinely file out in a quiet line into the hallways, where we were thought to be safer from any bomb attack. I remember that the school had issued each of us with a plastic disk which we wore around our necks. The disks had our names, addresses, and maybe our birthdate. I liked it because it reminded me of the "dog-tags" which soldiers wore around their necks. I also remember that we used to sing patriotic songs while we sat with our backs against the walls, waiting for Miss. Bildersee to come and see that all had gone well. Then a bell would sound and we would all go back to what we were doing in class. And once a week, we all brought 10 to 25 cents to school to buy War Stamps. I remember the day President Roosevelt died. I remember the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. And I remember the day the war ended.
The classrooms, which now I saw decorated with a variety of drawings and such done by the students, were at that time more formal in appearance. Above the blackboard, behind the teacher's desk at the front of the room, hung the ubiquitous portrait of George Washington (by Gilbert Stuart). Under that were the also ubiquitous series of cards around the room showing, in perfect penmanship, exactly how to make cursive upper and lower case letters of the alphabet. I seem to remember that we practiced doing that every day. Under the windows were usually rubber or geranium plants. Our desks were the standard school issue kind, bolted to the floor in neat rows, with the fold-down seats being attached to the desk behind. Each desk had one ink-well in the right-hand corner, and each ink-well had a rounded brass lid, which we religiously kept in a high degree of polish by a daily cleaning with our erasers (the ink erasers worked much better than the pencil erasers for this task). Starting in the second grade we were allowed to use ink in the practice of our alphabet and penmanship. The ink was dutifully dispensed each morning by one of the students -the ink monitor- from a large bottle with a long neck and a spout at the end. Our pens were the straight kind, with replaceable brass or steel points, that broke when you pressed too hard, which I always did, splattering ink on my shirt. By 5th grade, I got a fountain pen for a present, and this made the job a lot easier. (And then, about 1946, ball-point pens were invented, and the world has not been the same since.)
When we entered the gym I saw something I haven't thought about since I was a student here: a stick figure of a man painted on the gym wall, with one hand held out like a catcher's mitt. What a surprise to see it ... and to recall how we used to hurl balls (Spaldings, or Spaldeens as we used to call them) at the target of the catcher's mitt. I recall that the boy scouts and the sea scouts used to meet in this room once a week. By now we had climbed to the top floor. That was where the 7th and 8th grade had been, and where we started "departmental" classes, which meant that we had different teachers for different subjects - not the same teacher all day as in the lower grades. It was here that I really became interested in science, taught by Mr. Shapiro, and it was here that I felt the keen disappointment when another student was awarded the science medal when we graduated. The corner room on the 5th floor -the one with the built-in cabinets still in place- was where we had "shop", a carpentry class where we all made corner "bric-a-brac" shelves (mine wobbled!) while the girls went off to another room for "cooking". (These rooms have long since been converted for classrooms it seems.) It was a special time for us. I was elected the President of the Student Body in my last year. I remember at that time my feeling of being so "mature" when I had finally reached the top floor. We kidded with the girls, and a few of us, maybe, did a little more. We listened to music together -78 rpm records of Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, the Ink Spots, Nat King Cole, Dinah Shore. I can still remember the words and music of the pop songs of that time. They were joyful and hopeful. The war was over and a new world waited, both for our country, and for us in high school.
At the end of our tour, Ms. Teatum took me to her office -the Principals office. (I had never been to that office before; in my day this happened only when you had done something truly bad!) There she gave me a current copy of "News & Views". I had asked about this publication because my name had appeared in it in December 1941 for winning 2nd Prize in the Narcissus Contest (Naiomi Selkow won 1st Prize as I recall). I had wondered if this magazine was still being printed. I have long since lost my coveted copy from 1941, and it seems that P.S. 217's earliest copy dates from 1949. However, I am very glad to now have the newest edition. Ms. Teatum invited me to write something for the next issue, which I am glad to do. More than that, I am honored to do so. My afternoon at P.S. 217 was very special for me. I was seeing two P.S. 217's that afternoon: one as it is now, and the other as it was when I was there as a child. To see it now, 54 years after I first came to it, to remember it as I saw it then, and to think of it and all the students who were educated in it over all those years, is a unique experience, and one of the truly rich experiences in my life. I do not know if I shall ever get back to see it again. But that's alright. Because I now know that Thomas Wolfe was wrong. You see, for one brief, magic moment last month, thanks to Mary Teatum and P.S. 217, I was able to go home again.

P.S. 217 ALMA MATER

Oh 217
Dear 217Thy days we'll ne'er forget
The golden haze
Of student days
Is round about us yet
The days of yore
Will come no more
But through the future years
The thought of you
So good, so true
Will fill our eyes with tears
The thought of you
So good, so true
Will fill our eyes with tears

Michael Chriss, Class of 1949
[email protected]

[Joel RUBIN]

I was a graduate of the class of 1957. I loved reading this.
Many memories.
Lived on 18th Avenue E8th Street.
You mentioned Miss Bidersee she wore a monicle.
Miss McNaulty was the disciplinarian.
She kept our class after school one day and you couldn't leave till you recited a part of a poem from memory.
" Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime and departing leave behind us footprints on the sands of time."
Funny I still remember it.
The leader theater around the corner.
Casa del ray across the Street. A lunchinet on Coney Island Ave and another one on Newkirk Avenue.
Petito's Italian restaurant and new Toy Sun Chinese restaurant.
Safaris candy store Singers drug store Congregation Aguthath Shalom. And St Rose of Lima.
Going home for lunch every day.
Those were the days.
Joel Rubin

[Don Z. Block]

Steve Kutay, an alumnus from 900 Avenue H, how the hell are you? That McNulty seemed to take pleasure in terrorizing. I never had her for anything but had several unpleasant run-ins with her over gum chewing. A student with a name that was something like James Van Damme was one of her hit men; her way of controlling him was to hire him, and he would rat out gum chewers. He enjoyed his work. The McNultys of this world give public education a bad rep. These memories of her are far more accurate than anything written on her tombstone. Does anybody know where it is?

[Steve Kutay]

Since several people mention Miss McNulty, I can add a couple of comments. I went to PS 217 from around 1946-1953. No Junior High in those days. Miss McNulty was m homeroom teacher in 8th grade. Sepulchral is a good way to describe her. She was stricter than strict. There was only 1 kid in the class, Salvatrore Carbone, who was not afraid of her. What I particularly recall is the way she would have us move when we left the classroom. She would snap her bony fingers and say "Stand, face, pass."

[Don Z. Block]

It was Miss Bildersee, right? Bildersee had a brother named Isaac Bildersee, also a principal, and he managed to get into trouble over a church-state issue. He did not want religion in public-school classrooms. He died well before his sister, and I suspect he and sis did not get along. Dorothy Bildersee wrote a book. It lacks a dustjacket and is on sale for a fancy price and has been on sale for a very long time. I suspect it still is available.

Maxwell Proshan (known as Slapsy Maxie) could not control a classroom. He had a deep, intimidating booming voice, and the first impression a student got was that this guy was nobody to mess with. But he was. He was a sad figure.

Prentky was a departmental teacher for me. I am glad I saw her only for one class a day. She tried to come up with provocative topics, such as why the great wealth of the Queen of England was an obstacle to her happiness. These days, the Queen's face and her nauseating kids would appear to be more significant obstacles. The biggest obstacles the Prentky I knew had to overcome were her recurrent headaches. She always seemed to be suffering from one. How many kids did she have?

Shapiro was definitely bald but he was a hero only because of the rhyme. Occasionally, he would pose a mathematical puzzle that nobody but he could solve. Once, however, a student brought in a mathematical puzzle from Ripley's Believe it or Not, and believe it or not, the hero not only could not solve or explain it, but his anger suggested that he felt the student was trying to show him up. It was okay to make the student look foolish but not the teacher.

[Don Z. Block]

One of the songs we sang was "Faith of Our Fathers." I liked it. I still like it. I hate religion, but I liked and still like that song. Old Luther had a good ear. To me, it was just good music. Awful lyrics but good music. "In spite of dungeon, fire and sword!" How stupid, but what a great melody. It's important to teach the performers to focus on the sound and ignore the non-sense. "Faith of our Fathers, holy faith, we will be true to thee, til death." The hell I will, and keep your grubby religious claws off my tax money. Now play it again, maestro, this time the instrumental version.

[Sonia Smith]

I was Searching my history for PS 217
Back in 1965/Ms J.Kramer was my Teacher
In the 4th or 5th Grade
And 6th grade Mr Pomerantz..
What Fond Memories would like to know of any Class Pictures (Around that Time)?

[Matty Perlstein]

Found this blog and another one like it while Google searching for class pictures of PS 217. I graduated 6th grade at PS 217 in June 1960. I remember Mr. Dessot as the principal. He died in the summer of 1960. My kindergarten teacher was Miss Rabinowitz, 1st grade was Miss Waugh, 2nd Mrs. Schwartzberg, 3rd Mrs. Brickman, 4th Mrs. Kandel, 5th Mrs. Warshauer and 6th Mrs. Prentky for the first half and when she went on sabbatical, we had a pretty new young teacher named Mrs. Okun who lived nearby on Newkirk Ave. I don't know if I got all the Miss/Mrs. correct. Just guessed.

I notice two posters above who were in a class or two of mine, Susan Kleppel Serotte and Herb Yussim. I've posted some class pics on Facebook and the Brooklyn Board. I think you're both in at least one pic. Susan, even came across your sister Harriet on the Avenue J Facebook group.

I still see or communicate with some 217 people like Bernard Johnson and Jeffrey Nagler. My email is [email protected] if anyone wants to write.

[Nathaniel H Goldman]

In 1955, in Miss Kieselbach's 7th grade music class, there were a number of students of all religions, playing with a Chanukah dreidel. I was not one of them. All of a sudden, Kieselbach started screaming "DON'T YOU BRING RELIGION INTO CLASS". I couldn't have been more than ten feet from her, and I still remember the way that she looked at me, with those hateful, brown eyes. It was my first experience in my life, with anti-semitism. It really galled me (and still does), because for weeks prior to that incident, Miss Kieselbach was requiring all of the students to sing "Holy Night", "Deck the Halls", "The L-d's Prayer", etc. I guess that in her bigoted mind, she didn't consider the above as having to do with religion. Some twelve years later, in 1967, I saw Mrs. Prentky (also a teacher at 217), in Manhattan. I happened to mention that disturbing incident with the dreidel. She told me that she was not surprised, as Miss Kieselbach was an old time anti-semite. I later found out that in 1947, there was an attempt to stop forcing students to sing Christmas songs in the NYC public schools, but the effort failed.

[Nathaniel H Goldman]

I noticed a reference to a Miss McNulty. I forgot to mention in a prior posting, a very unpleasant experience that I had with her, around 1955. I remember the event, as if it was yesterday. My class was in the hallway changing classes. I can't recall whom I was looking for, when I happened to look in through a window of a classroom, while in the hallway. I could not have been at the window for more than 5 seconds, at the most. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, Miss McNulty came charging at me, with such venom and hostility, that I froze in my tracks. She screamed at me "I'LL KILL YOU". One would have thought that a major crime was being perpetrated. Today, if a teacher treated a student in that manner, for the above, they would be in hot water. Unfortunately, in those days, they got away with that sort of verbal abuse. Incidentally, there was a Miss Driscoll, who was the temporary Principal, after Miss Bildersee left in 1955. She also had a big mouth, and would scream at the students in the hallway. In retrospect, it is my opinion that many of those teachers who were never married, and were old spinsters, took their sexual frustrations out on the students, with their screaming.

[Tina Beck-Shapiro]

My brother Robert "Bobby" Beck went to 217 and I think graduated in 1954..I have the program somewhere....the valedictorian was Erich Segal
I lost my brother in 1996...he was 58 and I continue to look for people who might have known him...I saw a few names from the class picture that I recognize
My brother was a Brooklyn Dodger fan and played softball on a team that was sponsored by The Ten Thirty Bar
Tina

[Don Z. Block]

Two bags of bones are worth noting: McNulty and Neenan, skeletal figures who stalked the halls of 217 and probably still do. Neenan was another bible reader in the assemblies; she never, never smiled, and she had a way of closing the book with an audible puff sound that suggested to my brainless young mind great depths of profundity. The other bony one, McNulty, ran a secret service of hooligans who reported to her the things the rest of us were doing wrong, usually gum chewing. McNulty, armed with the stoolie's report, would slide through the seats of the assembly and pull out the guilty party. She specialized in making use of the worst kids in the school. And does everyone remember the monitors who wrote down on a pad the names of students who were making too much noise on the stairwells. Are you out there, Richard Landis? Do you still have your little notepad?

[Susan Kleppel Serotte]

I stumbled upon this blog while searching for the name of the pizza place that predated DiFara's on Avenue J. What fun I've had, reading the blog and comments, and reliving many memories!

While I graduated from 217 in 1960, I remember all the songs you quoted. Miss Bildersee was a very scary gal - did she ever smile or laugh? I liked Mrs. Driscoll, who was a stern but friendly assistant principal. Bildersee left while I was there, and Nathan Dessott (sp?) took over. He wasn't terribly warm either. My teachers were Sadie Rabinowitz, Jean Shulman, Bea Solodkin, Janet Kramer (only young one!), Martha Meyer, Mrs. Warshauer, and Mr. Friedman. He ran the after-school "dramatics club" and taught us to play basketball in gym class. We all used "boys' rules."

A few years ago, my son and I walked from Newkirk Plaza to PS 217. He was incredibly awed by the building, having grown up in sprawling suburban schools in Maryland. We weren't allowed to explore the building, even though the school day had just ended - a big disappointment!

I went to Midwood, after Ditmas JHS ( grew up near Barry Greenberg) and haven't lived in NYC since I left for college. But, my son now lives in Ditmas Park!

[Barry Greenberg]

I graduated PS 217 in 1954 and went on to Midwood HS. I lived on Ave H and E10th St. I of course remember Mrs Bildersee and Ms Neenan with great trepidation. The teachers I remember are : Harry Shapiro (the bald headed hero), Max Proshon (sp?), Mrs Prenkee (sp?), Mrs Kares,Mrs Kieselbach. I remember Dorthy Morris (I was very short and she was very tall) and Gayle Leben. Also Beverly Geller. Our class was divided between Jews and Catholics (mostly Italians)but I never remember any friction.

[Nathaniel H. Goldman]

There have been various postings about the ethnic makeup of P.S. 217, among the student population in the 1950's. Based upon the demographics of my 8th grade graduating class, I can state that our graduating class was 47% Jewish, 50% were Irish and Italian Catholic, and 2% Protestant. There were also two Asians, and two Blacks in our graduating class. In 1990, the Class of 1957 held a reunion at a nightclub on Ocean Parkway. I regret that I didn't attend, although I spoke to the organizer, who sent me a VCR tape of the event. Of 184 graduates, I believe that 83 former students were located. Of those, about 60 attended the event. In 1995, on a visit to Brooklyn, I took a photo of P.S. 217 from the school yard facing Westminster Road. It was a strange feeling, as I wasn't there for nearly thirty eight years. In any event, when I again visited Brooklyn, in 2002, and drove by Westminster Road, the former school yard facing that street was gone, as a new extension of P.S. 217 was built over the school yard. The remaining school yard still exists, facing Coney Island Avenue. I saw a U-Tube taken inside the lobby of P.S. 217, which showed the circular staircases, (leading up to the Principal's office), and the plaque inscription at the foot of the stairs. The name of the contractor which oversaw the construction of 217 in 1927, is indicated on the plaque. Last, regarding the school yard facing Westminster Road, we used to line up there to go to our home room in the mornings, and again in the afternoon, after lunch. There were various student guards who used to supervise that the lines going into the building were orderly. Also, the teachers, at a predetermined time would blow their whistles very loudly, to get us to line up. I remember the various propeller driven commercial airliners, which would fly overhead, on their way to LaGuardia Airport. It seemed that they flew quite low, on their final approach.

[Nathaniel H. Goldman]

In reference to the assemblies at P.S. 217, I have some pleasant memories of them. In 1954, some members of the Hopi Native American Indian tribe, came to P.S. 217, and entertained us; they were wearing their native costumes, and did various ceremonial dances. At the end, their hostess stated "Children, I hope that you can all visit us at our reservation in Arizona". For many years, I was always impressed, as I couldn't get over how many hundreds of miles those Hopi Indians came to Brooklyn to entertain us. However, I later found out that some Hopi Indians were in fact living in Brooklyn, NY. I don't know if they were the same ones who entertained us, but it is quite possible.
Regarding other assemblies, in 1952, Mrs. Wengraf's 4th grade class (which I was a member of) produced an excellent play about the Pilgrims and their first Thanksgiving in America. Mrs. Wengraf had the highest praise for all of us, as a lot of hard work went into that production, including the various costumes, which were worn by us. I don't remember if Miss Bildersee saw that play or not; however, in the 5th grade (Mrs. Goldstein's class), we had a play about the life of Abraham Lincoln. When that play was concluded, Miss Bildersee actually complimented us!

[Nathaniel H. Goldman]

I attended P.S. 217 from 1949-1957. We were in the last 8th grade graduating class at P.S. 217. After 1957, it became a Kindergarden-to 6th grade school. Now, P.S. 217 classes extend through the 5th grade. I don't know when the 6th grade was eliminated.

Regarding the former Principal, Miss Dorothy Bildersee, I don't have pleasant memories of her. She was a very autocratic individual. She used to come into our classrooms unexpectedly, and state "GOOD MORNING CHILDREN". In turn, the students were expected to state "Good morning, Miss Bildersee". She used to have a monocle, which was kept on a strap, which would hang from her neck. Her assistant was a Miss Neenan, who was always clearing her throat. In 1953, I had emergency surgery, and had to miss several weeks of school. When I came back, I was warmly welcomed by Mrs. Wengraf, and her fourth grade class. However, I had a pass to leave earlier, because of my surgery. I had to wait by the benches outside of Miss Bildersee's office, for my Mother to pick me up. This went well for several days, until one day, when we were surprised by Miss Bildersee. In spite of my pass, she read my Mother "the riot act", and told her in no uncertain terms, that she was not to come and meet me at that location. To this day, I don't know what Bildersee's problem was, and why she didn't want my Mother coming to pick me up, at that location. Many years later, my Mother was still speaking about that incident to me. A person such as Miss Bildersee, and her autocratic domineering personality, would certainly not be tolerated today.

In 1955, some miscreant in our 6th grade class set off a firecracker in the clothing closet. In those days, the teachers assumed that the boys in the class were behind that deed. Hence, only the boys were marched down to Bildersee's office, and had to stand with our faces to the wall, until someone would confess to setting off the firecracker. To this day, over sixty years later, I still don't know who did it. I couldn't enough gratitude when Miss Bildersee retired, shortly thereafter.

Two years later, at my graduation, in June, 1957, someone actually invited her to the ceremony. I couldn't believe it. She stated "children, I missed you all". I said to myself "Well, I certainly haven't missed you"!

[Anna Rousakis]

I can't find a "contact me" button on your blog, so I am posting a comment in hopes that you may read this. I am a current parent at PS 217 and a founder of the non profit The Friends of PS 217. I have enjoyed reading your posts about the school in the 1950s, and I would like to correspond with you about several things:

1. We are hosting an event at PS 217 featuring Sonny Fox, former host of "Wonderama" and graduate of 217. I wonder if you would be willing to announce this event to your readers.

2. The Friends of PS 217 tries to include a column about an alumnus/a in its biannual newsletter, and I wonder if you would be willing to write a brief column for us.

Please contact me at [email protected] or www.fo217.org.

Thanks,
Anna Beth Rousakis

[SD]

By the time I entered Erasmus in 1959 the cutoff had obviously moved from Foster Avenue to Farragut Road. Otherwise I would have gone to Midwood. My two friends lived on the Erasmus side of Farragut Road and they would definitely have gone to Erasmus if their mother, a Spanish teacher there, had not had them placed in Midwood. She did not want her kids going to a school where she herself taught.

Similarly the cutoff for PS 89 (two-year junior high school) had probably at one time been Farragut Road as well, but later had been moved to Foster Avenue. The eldest daughter of our tenants therefore went to PS 89, but when it was time for me to go a few years later, the cutoff change meant that it would have been necessary for me to go to PS 198. I was inconsolable because all of my friends were going to PS 89. Fortunately for me my older sister was a teacher in the NYC school system and she knew how to work the system so that her little brother could go to the school he wanted to attend.

Pulling rank? Sure. Manipulating an arbitrary system? Yes. But I'm glad my sister was able to. She was amazing to me then and forever after!

[Dorothy Morris]

Stumbled across the site while searching out PS 217. What a kick to read your great article about those God awful assemblies. The photo of the Class of 1952 on the steps of 217 is just the same as my Class of 1954 photo with the exception we had a lot more kids on the steps. The cutoff for attending Erasmus or Midwood was Foster Avenue. I went to Midwood and sure missed my friends from the other side of Foster Avenue. Gayle Leben who went to Erasmus was my best friend at 217 and I still think about her. Thanks for your great site! A real trip down memory lane!

[Toby Ballin]

The blouse we wore with the orange scarf was called a "middy," as in "a woman's or child's loose blouse with a collar that is cut deep and square at the back and tapering to the front, resembling that worn by a sailor."

Does anyone remember the ten qualities posted on the walls in our classrooms and, if it was your time period, near Mr. Blickstein's office? Someone remembers that there were ten but can only come up with four (Self Control, Courtesy, Dependability, Cooperation) so any help with the other six would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks.

[Herb Yussim]

Hmmm, are my memories that foggy (writing from my secluded home in the Oregon woods)? I was born in Dec '48 so I began school at PS 217 in '54? We had one Chinese boy, one Italian girl and one Black boy; everyone else was Jewish middle class. I dont remember the color of the tie, just that we wore them, had to have clean fingernails and a hankie in a (back) pocket too. I remember singing 'My Name is Dr Ironbeard', twiddle widdle wick, boom, boom. My teachers were Mrs Solotkin, Mrs Rice, Mr Frieidman, and I seem to remember an Asst Principal, Miss Driscall (sp?)...and she was a tall WASP and I think she knew she was out of place.
I remember singing Do Ya Ken John Peale...but I thought I sang that at the Brooklyn Museum's Children's Chorus under the direction of John Motley. There were also Saturday mornings in the basement of the Library near Erasmus Hall High School off Flatbush Ave, where kids sang folk songs under the direction of one of the Banjo picking beatnicks of the day...for all I know it was Pete Seeger, but I was too young to know or care. I have 8mm film of all that so maybe I should look at the film (if it doesnt fall apart due to ancient splices). Also Dad liked to go to the fountain at Washington Square Park in the Village on Sunday mornings to listen, sing with, speak with and meet the beatnicks of the day.

[Helen Bloch]

I went to PS 268 but the routine you've described and the uniforms are almost identical to my memories. At 268, the boys wore these short red crossover ties that had a snap in the middle. I have no idea what you would call them. We also had a color guard who would march into the auditorium carrying the flags. Sometimes students would get to read the hymn at assembly. I wonder if these practices were
citywide or just in Brooklyn? Separation of church and state wasn't a big issue then I guess.

[Vivian]

Did I remember all the lyrics out of my own head? No, Stu, I remembered bits and pieces and googled for the rest of the words. Sorry to disappoint you.

[Stuart Blickstein]

3 notes ....
1. Vivian - Do you really remember all of those lyrics, or did you use a cheat sheet, so to speak.
2. The girls wore 'middie blouses'. And for boys forgot their ties, Mrs. Graves kept a ready supply of green fabric scraps (an unusually kind description) for us to wear.
3. I'd like to contact the person who went to PS 193. My uncle was the principal there.

[David Schacker]

Maybe the P.S. stood for "Public Stalag."

[David Schacker]

Loved the bit about “size places.” Did you have to “square your corners” on your way into Assembly, or when entering the building from the schoolyard? We did, or else you got put in “the coop” (not the co-op, the coop) by a Guard or one of his Monitors. Three times in the coop and you were sent to Mr. Burke.

[epearl]

I went to P.S. 193 in Brooklyn and while I don't recall what the boys wore to assembly, I can tell you what the girls wore: Dark blue or black skirts, with a white blouse and an orange scarf around our necks. Why we wore orange scarfs is a mystery to me. I can't attach any significance to the color other than pumpkins at Halloween, but that was what the elders at P.S. 193 considered acceptable for young girls going to assembly.

[David Schacker]

What did we sing at P.S. 102? Every morning in 8th grade Miss F (an old isolationist who used to rail against FDR getting us into WW2) had us start the day with songs from a big silver-colored songbook. I remember two of the songs, songs that any red-blooded Brooklyn kid would love singing: “Hi Ho, Come To The Fair” and “Do Ye Ken, John Peale?”. Do you believe it: “Hi F---ing Ho, Come To The Fair”??? One morning Miss F made the mistake of asking us what song we’d like to sing, and the class bad boy, Victor J, who was always cracking wise, piped up: “Brooklyn Boogie.” Needless to say, young Master J was dealt with severely, but in retrospect he must be given points for honesty. We also sang a lot in Assembly (white shirt and red tie at P.S. 102); lots of Stephen Foster songs. I used to wince at the word “black” every time we sang “Old Black Joe,” but that was before it was okay to be black. (There were no blacks in the school.) At Thanksgiving, of course, the hymn which, until you filled me in, I remembered as: “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing / With something and something alive alive-o....” (I once had some lines to say in a Thanksgiving pageant, a gripping reenactment of the first Thanksgiving. I remember I couldn’t understand my line which started: “It is meat that we gather here...” Nobody would explain it to me so I obediently said it: “It is meat that we gather here...” I figured it had to do with the turkey, but no one ever explained whether it was white meat or dark meat.) At Christmas we sang carols, lots and lots of carols. Miss F, who led the assembly-singing, used to get very upset when we sang “Silent Night.” During the upward glissando in “Sleep in heavenly pe-e-e-e-eace” we would slide through every intermediate quarter-tone on our way up, everyone ascending at different rates. We must have sounded like 200 out-of-tune Hawaiian guitars. I always enjoyed singing Christmas carols, but as one of the two or three Jews in the whole school I didn’t think it was right for me to sing the words “Jesus” and “Christ.” Whenever these words came up I would slur over them, so at the end of the second verse of “Silent Night” it always came out something like “Crelmm our savior is born.”

[Don Z. Block]

My favorite Frostian understatement: "Ice is also great and would suffice."

[Emma]

Please read entire Quran before speaking of Islam.

1) Women in Islam marry prior having sex, that's how Islam instructed men and women to live. So naturally in Muslim culture, women who marry are virgins. In modern day, it presents benfits such asrevent spread of STDs which are so popular in Weatern Culture.

2) Women are to stay home and not to engage in jihad by sword (war). So there is no such a thing as 72 male virgins...Women will be freed of jealousy in the paradise and therefore they will never mind their husband being with 72 virgins.

3) Enjoy reading Quran, it has plenty of Intresting information.

[Unbob]

Or maybe 72 white grapes, which would be a more gender-neutral (if less seductive) reward. See The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran

The word huri, universally interpreted by scholars as white-eyed virgins (who will serve the faithful in Paradise; Qur'an 44:54, 52:20, 55:72, 56:22) means, according to Luxenberg, white grapes. He says that many Christian descriptions of Paradise describe it as abounding in pure white grapes. This sparked much joking in the Western press; suicide bombers would be expecting beautiful women and getting grapes.[11]

[ocalipoppy]

No comment.

[Sarah]

The portrait is not as little known as you think. I bought a fridge magnet version on my last visit to Chawton, where the gift shop also has it on a tea towel, biscuit tin and children's lunch box.

[Otis Jefferson Brown]

This portrait comes as a shock only to scholars who are in denial, or who fail to recognize the layers of “Freudience” in Austen’s oeuvre. That term was coined in the 1950s by the poet-mathematician-polymath Richard Mothpan. Surely you remember Mothpan; his probing analyses and poems appeared in that short-lived literary journal The Muse’s Anvil.

[Vivian]

Not a tall tale.

[Don Z. Block]

Sarah missed the part about the bulldog being shot, and I hope that part was part of the exaggeration of this tall tale, because bulldogs are nice dogs even when they are not being nice, which is rare, and there is usually a good reason why a bulldog is not being nice, such as the time I went to walk one in a rescue place for dogs and the dog snapped at me, but it turned out that it had a thorn in its paw, and that's what was making it snap, and everything would have been fine if only someone had looked at its paw and found that thorn, so I think it's safe to say that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds, and notice that I am not bringing up those beautiful flowers that have thorns in them, but ain't it a fact that pain is a great teacher and a great explainer, and that one should stay away from the thorns of plenty.

[Sean Robertson]

This might just be the longest run-on sentence ever written. LOL

[Sarah]

Dr M, could you read it out and post an audio clip on here? I'd love to hear it instead.

[Sarah]

I'm sure I would have enjoyed that as much as your other postings if only it had some punctuation. Sadly I had to give up a quarter of the way through.

[Jimmie Simmons]

My admiration for Dr. Hutton as a teacher just increased immeasurably after reading your blog! Imagine a professor's dilemma when faced with choices of readings (in a Latin grammar class, yet)for undergraduates. How do you get them to engage with the subject matter, and even do independent research? BRAVO!

[Stephen Lewin]

I happened once again on your "blaugh" after months of my inactivity. What a pleasure to again be exposed to your erudition and whimsy!
steve lewin.

[Don Z. Block]

I agree again with Steve Lewin. Terence, this is not stupid stuff.

[Steve Lewin]

What a wonderous tidbit! Informative, yes. But also full of humor AND wisdom. One of the Good Doctor’s best.
Steve

[Don Z. Block]

I think I am still teaching, but very few of the college students I teach know much about World War II. If I ask which country was this country's strongest ally, I will usually get either "I don't know" or "France." Nobody knows which country was most responsible for eviscerating the German army. Nobody will know the difference between the Eastern and Western fronts. Sometimes, I will get a student who does not know who won.

[SD]

A trolley ride for the books -- congrats to you both!

[Darrell Fancourt]

Mazel tov!

[David Schacker]

Well said -- and congratulations!

[Stephen M Lewin]

Dr. M:
Informative jot and engagingly told.
s.

[nevergoingbacktobeardstown]

I grew up in Beardstown during the late 2000s and through the early 2010s. Mrs. White was my elementary music teacher. I was glad to read she’s retired and still living in town, but disappointed to know she became a Trump supporter. Though given my experience growing up in town I’m not surprised at all by the amount of rabid Trump supporters you would find in town.

Your description and assessment of Beardstown is correct. Moving away was the best thing that could have happened to me as a teenager. Lots of folks grow up there and never leave. Some go off to serve or to college and end up coming back. The best thing to do in Beardstown is to leave.

I enjoyed reading your post!

[Mary K. Wakeman]

Oh Vivian, while you were flagellating yourself for not speaking up, I was protesting, "but you were the person whose opinion I trusted in matters of right and wrong!"

(In my "autobiography," I also dwell on how the need to conform to the customs of the time/place, misled me from my authentic self.) Youth is hard!

I do admire your eloquence!

[Jimmie Simmons]

This story is not unique to Boulder, and sounds all too familiar. In addition to the reactivation of our neighborhood associations, and all of the above solutions, our university city/wretched little village now allows a deed restriction. A homeowner designates his/her property "single-family" and sells it as such. Further, the NA's proposed a "no-more-than-two-unrelated" occupancy rule for landlords that City Council approved about ten years ago. These moves forced the University to provide on-campus housing. Our "Hill" benefitted from these measures. (The sports problem remains).

[Bill Briggs]

Hi Vivian --

As one who has memories of Boulder and CU even more distant than yours, I truly enjoyed your reminiscences. I think there is one major omission in your tale of how we got from the 1970s to 2020: it's athletics, a major contributor to the party school image, to the alcohol culture, and to the general demise of CU as an institution at which (undergraduate) education is a priority. Perhaps we should collaborate on that story. Thanks.

[Sharon Mathison]

I also have this muched loved stuffed animal. Like your children, I always thought he was a dog. His name is Bowsie and after 57 years he still sits on my bed.

Do you know what the original name of this stuffed animal was? I never had any luck researching.

Thank you for sharing.

[eve]

i love puppy

[Don Z. Block]

Two of my six dogs turn their hound noses up at bones and focus their teeth on the many stuffed animals in the family room. The floor is always covered by what looks like snow. Even before a stupid and vicious liar commandeered the oval office, we have lived in a dog-eat-stuffed-animals world. In the event of a natural disaster--floods and big winds have been taking huge chunks out of my neighborhood--both dogs and stuffed animals would have to be rescued, probably by boat. What would be left when we reach a shore?

[Martin Mangold]

Wonderful approach to this phrase. My takeaway definition is “idiotic observations.”

[Barbara Hennessy]

Thank you for the great blog on directional dyslexia. I have difficulties with left/right and routinely get lost or mess up in aerobics classes, but I am great with paper maps so I get people to tell me whether I need to go north or south, etc. To all those who are embarrassed, I say be loud and proud of your quirk. I tell all my medical caregivers and employers. They need to know in case you cannot follow instructions and much less embarrassing. Forewarned is usually forgiven.

[Barbara (Bisson) Hennessy]

My maiden name was Bisson (ancestors from the island of Jersey between England and France). I was also told that "Bisson" was from the French word "buisson" meaning "bush" so you may wish to check further.

[Thomas Stumpf]

Thanks for the illumination of "bisson conspectuities," a phrase that's fascinated me for a long time. I didn't know the textual history and would never have thought Theobald could make an inspired emendation. "Glean" is the perfect word, too, since it implies a painstaking, discerning picking out, something a bleared vision could never do.

[Don Z. Block]

There's a very funny poem by Updike ("Greek God?") that ends with a couplet that is something like

Dad drove me to college and turned me loose.
At twenty-one, I was elected Zeus.

Two poets who have not gotten their due:
John Updike, and you.

[Sarah Finch]

Very good!

[Stan Rojek]

That explains the reference to "golden showers" in the dossier!

[Don Z. Block]

Did you miss trigger finger?

[Frances Montell]

What I mean is: either follow the rule or don't. Don't try to find some sneaky loophole to get around the rule, and pretend that you are still "observant" while you flout the very spirit of the rule you claim to follow.

[Frances Montell]

What I dislike about an eruv is that it is another case of the Orthodox being more concerned with the letter and not the spirit of the rules. If keeping the Shabbat means not carrying anything outside of your house, then you shouldn't do it. If you are going to carry something outside your house, then you are not really keeping the Shabbat the way it was intended. It is like women wearing beautiful wigs to cover up their ordinary hair. Why is it forbidden to show your hair? How is wearing an attractive wig still following this rule?

[Elroy]

This is a clear case of:
a) summapietatefictusism
b) rerumnominainnovarism
c) all the above

[David]

I agree with everything you say.

[Kate]

Well, I have a spinning wheel and making yarn is one of my hobbies. The point is that spinning is very meditative - so if you are cross, give yourself some alone time, have a cup of tea, and by the time you are finished your mood will improve and you will be fit company for your neighbours!

[Deborah Meyler]

We used to call each other crosspatches when we were children, taking it from adults, of course. A perfectly nice person could suddenly become a crosspatch, and then would come round again. I don't think that the woman in the rhyme would be permanently cross due to straitened circumstances or the miseries of trickle-down economics. She might be so regularly cross that she deserves the epithet, but I think the exhortation is the one that I heard countless times gowing up - have a cup of tea and feel better, and then, when you are in a better mood due to the tea, ask your friends in and feel better still. I'd bet my hat - although I have no way of knowing - that "take a cup" refers to tea. Spinners wouldn't have been able to spin very well if they had all been Mrs Gamps. My great aunts who all worked in the mills, and my grandmother (and her mother) - they all drank tea as if it was going out of fashion, and spiritous liquor consumption amounted more or less to a little glass of sherry at Christmas.

[Joe]

I have always seen this more as a trajectory of emotion; a reaction to some unknown wrong, real or perceived, that leads our protagonist to loop out of society and sulk, spinning sullenly in her drab parlour, cogitating on events. Eventually, upon resorting to some restorative liquor, the iron fug of mental dolour is lifted, and the loop is completed by a return to sociability.
This

[diane]

As a spinner, there is nothing more calming when grumpy than to make a cup of tea, sit at my spinning wheel and spin. After a bit of time spinning in solitude with that good cup of tea, I am much more amenable to having company!

[John Orford]

The cup certainly doesn't have to be tea - it could equally be wine or punch in the old days. Crosspatch draws the latch, sits and broods over her (somehow it seems to be a poor lonely old lady) troubles, then begins to feel better, brews some punch and calls her neighbours to share it and help her feel brighter.

[gloria]

I fear you have missed the point of the rhyme - it is not advice to 'call the neighbors in' - instead it is an observation of the lonely/selfish behaviour of this solitary person, who draws the latch (locks the door), makes and drinks a cup of tea, and only then invites others to join her - i.e. will not share the drink!